
Ask HN: What software documentation tools do you use (for JavaScript codebases)? - jthomerson
We have a half dozen or more git repos, each with a README.md file. Some of those repos contain front-end JS libraries or apps, in which case we use JSDoc to generate the documentation for that repo. Other repos represent a particular system, and contain numerous microservices. Each microservice has its own README.md. We also have other markdown files containing coding standards and other documentation that&#x27;s not specific to a single project.<p>We need documentation at several levels: the codebase itself (mostly JSDoc), the individual library or microservice (mostly the README.md explaining that library or service), but then also at a higher-level: how do all the services in this system (repo) tie together and interoperate? Or, in a separate primarily-docs repo: here&#x27;s our coding standards, official policies on things such as security, etc.<p>Ideally we&#x27;d have a tool that we could run on our CI server that builds docs from each of those repos and exports the docs as a static site. We&#x27;d also be able to easily link between services and code across codebases.<p>I&#x27;ve looked at &#x2F; tried Sphinx, but since we are primarily JS &#x2F; Markdown, it would be very different to try to use it for our projects, and the sphinx-js integration was lacking (couldn&#x27;t really replace our JSDoc builds). I&#x27;ve tried a number of static site generators (e.g. hexo, hugo, etc), but they tend to be more about sites and blogs, and don&#x27;t seem to work well for documentation.<p>What do you use?
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jthomerson
Here's an example of the structure of our repos we'd want to document:
[https://gist.githubusercontent.com/anonymous/f88e2917b5513c2...](https://gist.githubusercontent.com/anonymous/f88e2917b5513c2966f0f670d25d4b5b/raw/8e62b3e09be2f8f029e5ad3d063c953690b1aafd/codebases.txt)

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megamindbrian2
I like jupyter, it's like markdown right next to the code it runs.

