RSpec HTTP API Documentation 📠

Automatically generates the documentation for your HTTP API.

The idea is simple, you write the request specs, run your tests and you end up with an HTML file with grouped examples of the request and response examples.

I've tried a lot of tools in the hope to solve a simple problem: automatically generate the API documentation based on a simple RSpec request test.

Tools like Blueprint, OpenAPI Swagger are great as a concept, but either require some DSL (aka, more work on my side huh) or these are high maintenance if your API design requires some flexibility and rapidly evolves.

Either way, there's only one single source of truth: your tested code. This tool is just an easy way to help your front-end/mobile team how to communicate with your HTTP API.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'rspec-apidoc'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install rspec-apidoc

Add this to your RSpec setup (eg. spec/support/autoapi.rb):

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.add_formatter(RSpec::Apidoc)
  # Optionally add a visual formatter as well...
  # config.add_formatter(:progress)

  config.apidoc_title = 'YOUR.APP API Documentation'
  config.apidoc_description = \
    'A longer intro to add before the examples: authentication, status codes...'

  config.apidoc_host = 'https://api.YOUR.APP'
  # Optionally specify the output file path.
  config.apidoc_output_filename = 'apidoc.html'

  # Customize the authentication header
  config.apidoc_auth_header = lambda do |headers|
    '"Authorization: Bearer $AUTH_TOKEN"' if headers['Authorization']
  end

  # You can add it to any example based on the metadata.
  config.after(:each, type: :request) do |example|
    RSpec::Apidoc.add(self, example)
  end
end

After checking out the repo, run bundle to install dependencies.

Then, run rake spec to run the tests.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install.

To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Everyone interacting with this project codebase, issue tracker, chat rooms and mailing list is expected to follow the code of conduct.