Xcribe is a doc generator for Rest APIs built with Phoenix. The documentation is generated by the test specs.

Currently both Blueprint and Swagger (OpenAPI Spec 3.0) syntax are supported. In the future other formats will be added.

Add Xcribe to your application

mix.exs

def deps do
  [
    {:xcribe, "~> 0.7.12"}
  ]
end

Update deps

mix deps.get

Xcribe requires that you create an "Information Module". This module defines the custom information about your API documentation.

Create a module that uses Xcribe.Information as:

defmodule YourAppWeb.Support.DocInformation do
  use Xcribe.Information

  xcribe_info do
    name "Your awesome API"
    description "The best API in the world"
    host "http://your-api.us"
  end
end

Add a new configuration with the created module

config/test.exs

  config :xcribe,
    information_source: YourAppWeb.Support.DocInformation,
    format: :swagger,
    output: "app_doc.json"

Next, in your test/test_helper.exs you should configure ExUnit to use Xcribe formatter. You would probably like to keep the default ExUnit.CLIFormatter as well.

test/test_helper.exs

 ExUnit.start(formatters: [ExUnit.CLIFormatter, Xcribe.Formatter])

Xcribe generates documentation from Plug.Conn struct used on your tests. To document a route you need pass the conn struct to macro document.

First you need import Xcribe.Document macro in your ConnCase file (usally located in /test/support/conn_case.ex). Doing that, document/2 macro will be available into your test specs.

/test/support/conn_case.ex

defmodule YourAppWeb.ConnCase do
  use ExUnit.CaseTemplate

  using do
    quote do

     ...

      # import Xcribe `document/2` macro
      import Xcribe.Document

     ...

    end
  end
end

Now in your tests you should call the macro document with the conn struct

test "get posts", %{conn: conn} do

  response =
    conn
    |> get("/posts")
    |> document()
    |> json_response(200)

  assert response == []
end

you can specify a custom request name by passing an argument as: "description" to the macro

test "get posts", %{conn: conn} do

  response =
    conn
    |> get("/posts")
    |> document(as: "index request")
    |> json_response(200)

  assert response == []
end

To generate the doc file run mix test with an env var XCRIBE_ENV=true

XCRIBE_ENV=true mix test

A file api_doc.apib will be created with the documentation if ApiBlueprint is configured. If Swagger format is chosen, then openapi.json file will be created.

The output file is write in Blueprint sintax. To render to HTML you can use the tools listed at APIBLUEPRINT.ORG

If Swagger format is configured, Swagger UI can be used to display Swagger documentation.

You can add this configurations to your config/test.ex

• information_source: the module with doc information
• output: a custom name to the output file
• format: ApiBlueprint or Swagger formats
• env_var: a custom name to the env to active Xcribe.Formatter
• json_library: The library to be used for json decode/encode.
• serve: Enables Xcribe serve mode. See more in Serving doc session.

Example

config :xcribe, [
  information_source: YourAppWeb.Information,
  output: "API-DOCUMENTATION.apib",
  format: :api_blueprint # or :swagger,
  env_var: "DOC_API",
  json_library: Jason
]

Serve doc

Contributing Guide

Apache License, Version 2.0 © Finbits