

Ask HN: software for project documentation? - porker

I&#x27;ve taken over a legacy project that has no documentation, and no documentation infrastructure.<p>I need to start creating documentation and set up best practices. This isn&#x27;t about per-class, per-method documentation, but covering the architecture of the web app, its style guide, where Redis is used etc.<p>Setting up Confluence would have too much overhead (as they don&#x27;t see the need, they don&#x27;t want to use my time for that). They&#x27;re not using GitHub, so GitHub wikis are out (though not my preferred choice either).<p>Last time I looked for solutions was c. 2008 when dokuwiki was popular; what&#x27;s appeared since? I am aware I could use virtually any CMS or Wiki, but I&#x27;d like to know what&#x27;s worked for other teams.<p>Thanks!
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qznc
I like Sphinx [0]. For example, I used it for this D tutorial [1]. I do not
like wikis or cms, because I like my documentation in a version control
system.

[0] [http://sphinx-doc.org/](http://sphinx-doc.org/) [1]
[http://qznc.github.io/d-tut/](http://qznc.github.io/d-tut/)

~~~
mesec
+1 for Sphinx. For me, it's crucial that code and documentation are kept
closely together. As in, changes to the code and the related documentation go
in the same commit. In my experience, that's the only way to keep them in
sync. Sphinx works great in this scenario, can output the docs in many
different formats, default HTML output has search built-in etc. It's cross-
platform (although I've used it on Windows and Linux only, I'm pretty sure it
works on Macs as well).

This is good stuff, too:
[http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/](http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/)

