Automatically generate documentation for your project using MDX

gatsby-documentation-starter

Automatically generate documentation for your project using MDX, react-docgen, and GatsbyJS.

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Features

? MDX - Write your documentation in Markdown and include React components using JSX!
♻️ react-docgen - Automatically parses all your React components (functional, stateful, even stateless!) for JS Docblocks and Prop Types.
⚛️ GatsbyJS - Creates local GraphQL server to build static version of documentation (easily deployed on a CDN or GHPages, Netlify, etc)
? Props Table - Component for displaying component props in a table format
? Modular - Easily install inside existing projects!
⚖️ Lightweight - Only what you need, no extra dependencies.

Quick Start

Install with Netlify

Install with Gatsby CLI

gatsby new docs https://github.com/whoisryosuke/gatsby-documentation-starter/

Custom install

git clone https://github.com/whoisryosuke/gatsby-documentation-starter.git
Update gatsby-config.js with the location of your components + MDX (see: "Changing source folder")
npm install inside project
npm run develop
View your documentation: http://localhost:8000

Creating documentation

Documentation is sourced from two places: component source code and MDX files.

src
└── components
    └── Button
        ├── Button.js
        └── Button.mdx

React-docgen grabs any JS Docblocks you write for your React classes/functions (Button.js), as well as the Prop Types. These are displayed on your documentation page, with the props displayed in a table.

Inside your MDX file you can write additional documentation with JSX examples. You can also specify the page slug here (a page name and category). Your pages will be generated as http://yoursite.com/<category>/<pageName>.

In order for your component data to show up, you need an MDX file for the component - and the page name and component name in the docblock need to match.

/**
 * ComponentTitle
**/
class ComponentName extends React.Component {}

---
name: ComponentTitle
menu: CategoryName
---

Creates a page for the component located at http://localhost:8000/categoryname/componentname

Documentation

Customizing sidebar navigation

The sidebar navigation is generated from two places: a JSON config with static pages, and component MDX files. The static pages are displayed before the components.

To customize the static pages, go to gatsby-config.js and edit the sidebar object inside the siteMetadata config. Each page is represented as an object with a slug (the URL) and title:

  siteMetadata: {
    title: 'Gatsby Documentation Starter',
    sidebar: {
      pages: [
        {
          slug: '/about',
          title: 'about',
        },
      ],
    },
  },

The component pages in the navigation are automatically generated by querying all components with MDX files. If you want to change this, see section: "Creating pages from react-docgen"

You can override all of this functionality inside components/sidebar.js.

Changing source folder

Add the relative location of your components and MDX files in gatsby-config.js. The default configuration is set to the /src/components/ folder of your root project (which ideally should document every component):

    {
      resolve: `gatsby-source-filesystem`,
      options: {
        name: `components`,
        path: `../src/components/`,
      },
    },

Gatsby will load all the JS and MDX files inside this folder. Then using the "transformer" plugins, Gatsby creates GraphQL endpoints for both components and MDX (allMdx and allComponentMetadata).

You can add as many file sources as you need. The transformer plugins will automatically group content based on their format (JS, MDX, etc), and it uses all the content that's loaded.

Adding to existing projects

This project is designed to be embedded inside existing projects.

git clone this repo into your project as a docs subfolder.
Optionally change the folder where components are loaded from (see "Changing source folder")
npm install && npm run develop

Creating pages from react-docgen

This template is setup to generate pages based off MDX files in your project. This allows you to create a Button.mdx to document your <Button />.

It's not required to make pages based off MDX. You can use Gatsby's default routing configuration, which creates pages based on any .js files located in the pages subfolder.

If you don't plan on having MDX files for each component, you can easily swap over to using react-docgen data to generate pages. That way, you're ensured a documentation page for each component (instead of MDX file). This isn't the only option either, Gatsby's flexibility allows you to use both react-docgen and MDX files if you wanted the best of both worlds

gatsby-node.js:

/**
 * Implement Gatsby's Node APIs in this file.
 *
 * See: https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/node-apis/
 */

const path = require('path')
const componentWithMDXScope = require('gatsby-mdx/component-with-mdx-scope')

exports.createPages = ({ graphql, actions }) => {
  const { createPage } = actions
  return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
    resolve(
      graphql(
        `
          {
            allComponentMetadata {
              edges {
                node {
                  id
                  displayName
                  docblock
                  doclets
                  childrenComponentProp {
                    name
                    docblock
                    required
                    type {
                      value
                    }
                    defaultValue {
                      value
                      computed
                    }
                  }
                  composes
                }
              }
            }
          }
        `
      ).then(result => {
        if (result.errors) {
          console.log(result.errors)
          reject(result.errors)
        }
        // Create blog posts pages.
        result.data.allComponentMetadata.edges.forEach(async ({ node }) => {
          createPage({
            path: `/components/${node.displayName.toLowerCase()}`,
            component: componentWithMDXScope(
              path.resolve('./src/templates/posts.js'),
              node.code.scope
            ),
            context: {
              id: node.id,
              name: node.displayName,
            },
          })
        })
      })
    )
  })
}

We query the components through the react-docgen endpoint and use those to generate pages (instead of MDX files). Then we alter the page template to query MDX by name (located in the Markdown 'frontmatter'), and component by ID (the vice versa of it's default setup):

templates/posts.js:

import React, { Component } from 'react'
import { graphql } from 'gatsby'
import MDXRenderer from 'gatsby-mdx/mdx-renderer'
import { MDXProvider } from '@mdx-js/tag'

import Layout from '../components/layout'
import PropsTable from '../components/propstable'

export default class MDXRuntimeTest extends Component {
  render() {
    const { children, data, tableOfContents } = this.props
    return (
        <MDXProvider>
          <Layout>
            <div className="content">
              {children}
              <h1>{data.componentMetadata.displayName}</h1>
              <p>{data.componentMetadata.docblock}</p>
              <MDXRenderer tableOfContents={tableOfContents}>
                {data.mdx.code.body}
              </MDXRenderer>
              <h2 style={{ marginTop: '2rem' }}>Props:</h2>
              <PropsTable
                propMetaData={data.componentMetadata.childrenComponentProp}
              />
            </div>
          </Layout>
        </MDXProvider>
    )
  }
}

export const pageQuery = graphql`
  query($id: String!, $name: String!) {
    mdx(frontmatter: { name: { eq: $name } }) {
      id
      code {
        body
      }
      tableOfContents
    }
    componentMetadata(id: { eq: $id }) {
      id
      displayName
      docblock
      doclets
      childrenComponentProp {
        name
        docblock
        required
        parentType {
          name
        }
        type {
          value
        }
        defaultValue {
          value
          computed
        }
      }
      composes
    }
  }
`