

Ask HN: What do you use for internal API docs? - arihant

Our codebase is sizing up considerably. Moreover, we are moving to different platforms and it&#x27;s becoming hard to keep track of APIs (private and public) for even the guys who wrote them.<p>Is there a better way to manage this? Some kind of tool that takes stuff like javadoc and turns it into pretty, searchable interfaces? Something that extracts data from Git repo? An IDE plugin? Anything but the abomination that we&#x27;re dealing with right now.<p>I&#x27;m sure this is a common pain. How do you manage this?
======
smt88
Do the inline documentation with the apiDoc format[1]. Readme.io has also
created and documented a superset of apiDoc that you might want to look into.
Obviously their tool supports it, but it seems easy to roll your own frontend
for the API data once you extract it from your code.

1\. [http://apidocjs.com/](http://apidocjs.com/)

~~~
gdillon
Thanks for the rec! I'm obviously super biased (ReadMe founder, here), but
ReadMe was built for this kind of scenario, spot on. apiDoc is good for
keeping the endpoint docs up to date, and you can keep it internal with a
password or admin-only access. Search should be improving later this month.

~~~
arihant
ReadMe is the one that looks very promising. But somewhere on HN, someone from
your team commented that internal use is frowned upon and the system gets more
and more naggy if used internal only. Is that still true? If yes, does that
stop after we start paying?

------
anonfunction
Lot's of people seem to like
[https://github.com/tripit/slate](https://github.com/tripit/slate)

------
cjbprime
There's also Swagger: [http://swagger.io/](http://swagger.io/)

