Streamline Your Project Documentation with GitHub Actions and JSDoc: A Step-by-Step Guide

If you’re working on a project, it’s important to have documentation that explains how to use your code. This makes it easier for others to understand your project and contribute to it. In this article, we’ll show you how to generate documentation for your JavaScript project using GitHub Actions and JSDoc.

JSDoc is a tool that generates documentation for JavaScript code. It uses comments in your code to create documentation that describes how to use your code. GitHub Actions is a tool that allows you to automate tasks in your GitHub repository. By combining these two tools, you can automatically generate documentation for your project whenever you make changes to it.

Documentation is an essential aspect of any software project. It helps developers and users understand the codebase and its functionality. Generating documentation can be a tedious task, but with the help of GitHub Actions and JSDoc, it can be streamlined and automated. In this article, we will walk you through the process of setting up GitHub Actions to generate documentation for your project using JSDoc.

Step 1: Install JSDoc The first step is to install JSDoc. JSDoc is a documentation generator for JavaScript, and it can be installed using npm. To install JSDoc, run the following command:

npm install -g jsdoc

Step 2: Configure JSDoc The next step is to configure JSDoc. Create a configuration file named jsdoc.json in the root directory of your project. Here’s an example configuration:

{
  "source": {
    "include": ["src"],
    "includePattern": ".+\\.js(doc|x)?$",
    "excludePattern": "(^|\\/|\\\\)_"
  },
  "plugins": ["plugins/markdown"],
  "opts": {
    "recurse": true,
    "destination": "docs/",
    "template": "node_modules/docdash",
    "readme": "README.md"
  },
  "markdown": {
    "idInHeadings": true
  },
  "templates": {
    "cleverLinks": false,
    "monospaceLinks": false,
    "default": {
      "outputSourceFiles": true,
      "layoutFile": "./node_modules/docdash/layout.tmpl"
    }
  }
}

This configuration tells JSDoc to look for source code in the src directory, exclude files that start with an underscore, and output documentation to the docs/ directory using the Docdash template. You can customize the configuration to fit your project’s needs.

Step 3: Create a GitHub Actions Workflow The next step is to create a GitHub Actions workflow to run JSDoc and generate documentation automatically. Create a new file named .github/workflows/docs.yml with the following content:

name: Generate Docs
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
jobs:
  generate_docs:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Install Dependencies
        run: npm install
      - name: Generate Docs
        run: npx jsdoc -c jsdoc.json
      - name: Commit Docs
        run: |
          git config --local user.email "action@github.com"
          git config --local user.name "GitHub Action"
          git add .
          git commit -m "Generate Docs"
      - name: Push Docs
        uses: ad-m/github-push-action@master
        with:
          github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          branch: gh-pages
          force: true

This workflow runs JSDoc on every push to the main branch, generates documentation, commits it to the gh-pages branch, and pushes the changes back to the repository. Note that you need to enable GitHub Pages on the gh-pages branch for this to work.

Step 4: Commit and Push Changes The final step is to commit and push the changes to your repository. Once you push the changes, GitHub Actions will automatically run JSDoc and generate documentation for your project.

Conclusion Generating documentation for your project can be a time-consuming task, but with GitHub Actions and JSDoc, you can streamline the process and automate it. By following the steps outlined in this article, you can set up GitHub Actions.

Reference Link ::

• Click to visit Official JSDoc documentation
• An API documentation generator for JavaScript
• Template 1 Docstrap
• Template 2 Better Docs
• https://github.com/msrajawat298/msrajawat298/blob/main/how-to-create-documention-js-project.md

Some other tool

• Build tools :: grunt
• jsdoc action to deploy docs : https://github.com/andstor/jsdoc-action

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