Documentation plays a crucial role in the development process as it helps in understanding and maintaining codebases. Generating documentation manually can be time-consuming and prone to errors. To overcome this, integrating automated documentation generation into your Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) workflow can make your life easier.

In this blog post, we will discuss how to configure automated documentation generation in your JavaScript CI/CD workflow using popular tools like JSDoc and GitHub Actions.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Setting up JSDoc
• Configuring GitHub Actions
• Conclusion

Introduction

JSDoc is a documentation generation tool for JavaScript projects. It allows you to write documentation comments in your code using a specific syntax and generates HTML documentation based on those comments. By integrating JSDoc into your CI/CD workflow, you can automatically generate up-to-date documentation with every code change.

Setting up JSDoc

First, you need to install JSDoc using npm:

npm install --save-dev jsdoc

Next, create a configuration file for JSDoc named jsdoc.conf.json in the root of your project:

{
  "source": {
    "include": ["./src"],
    "exclude": ["./node_modules", "./test"]
  },
  "opts": {
    "destination": "./docs"
  },
  "templates": {
    "cleverLinks": false,
    "monospaceLinks": false
  }
}

In this configuration file, you define the source directory where your code resides (./src), the destination directory for the generated documentation (./docs), and any excluded directories like node_modules and test.

Now, you can add a script in your package.json file to generate the documentation:

{
  "scripts": {
    "doc": "jsdoc -c jsdoc.conf.json"
  }
}

Running npm run doc will generate the documentation in the specified destination directory.

Configuring GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions allow you to automate workflows in your repository. To automatically generate documentation on every commit, you can create a workflow file .github/workflows/docs.yml:

name: Generate Documentation

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  generate:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    
    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
      
      - name: Setup Node.js
        uses: actions/setup-node@v2
        with:
          node-version: 14
      
      - name: Install packages
        run: npm ci

      - name: Generate Documentation
        run: npm run doc

      - name: Commit documentation
        run: |
          git config user.name github-actions
          git config user.email github-actions@github.com
          git add ./docs
          git commit -m "Update documentation [skip ci]"

This workflow is triggered on every push to the main branch. It checks out the code, sets up Node.js, installs the dependencies, generates the documentation using the doc npm script, and commits the documentation back to the repository.

Make sure to exclude the docs directory from your repository’s .gitignore file.

Conclusion

By configuring automated documentation generation in your JavaScript CI/CD workflow, you can ensure that your documentation stays up-to-date with each code change. This process saves time and effort while providing accurate and accessible documentation for your project. Integrating JSDoc with GitHub Actions allows for seamless automation, making it a valuable addition to your development workflow.

So why not give it a try and experience the benefits of automated documentation generation in your JavaScript projects?

#References

• JSDoc
• GitHub Actions