sethvincent / minidocs

:scroll: build a minimalist site for your documentation

minidocs

build a site for your documentation

This module generates a documentation site from two simple components: (1) a collection of markdown documents and (2) a hierarchical object specifying your table of contents.

This module is intentionally simpler and more opinionated than something like Jekyll or Sphinx. Depending on what you're looking for, that might be good, because it's easier to reason about, or not, because it's less flexible! It'll probably be most useful if your documentation already consists entirely of markdown files, and it composes well with any tools that generate markdown, for example ecosystem-docs, which pulls README files from a collection of GitHub repositories.

There are options for specifying a project logo and which document to show on load. Support for themes, and bundling via a command-line tool, coming soon. PRs welcome!

live demo

install

Add to your project with

npm install minidocs

example

Specify a table of contents

var contents = {
  'overview': {
    'about': 'about.md'
  },
  'animals': {
    'furry': {
      'sheep': 'sheep.md'
    },
    'pink': {
      'pig': 'pig.md'
    }
  }
}

Then generate the site

var minidocs = require('minidocs')
minidocs(contents)

This assumes you have the files about.md, sheep.md, and pig.md inside a local folder markdown.

To run a full example, clone this repository, go into the folder example then call

npm install
npm start

usage

require('minidocs')(contents, opts)

Where contents is an object describing the hierarchy of contents, used to build the sidebar, and opts is an object that can specify the following options

• logo relative file path to a logo file, if unspecified will not include a logo
• initial which document to show on load, if unspecified will load the first document
• root a DOM node to append to, if unspecified will append to document.body

license

MIT