Postman generate api documentation how to#

Twitter API documentation with metadata, examples, and folders 3. You will author the content inside Postman in Markdown, but consumers will view it in the web browser as HTML.

Style your descriptions, add tables, and embed screenshots using Markdown so readers can quickly identify the most relevant details. Add and format descriptions: Provide a description for each parameter, request, folder, and collection.Organize logically in folders: If your collection contains lots of requests, stay clean and tidy by ordering and grouping requests in folders to make the documentation easier to navigate.method, URL, headers) displays in the way you want.

Verify the request metadata: If you previously used a machine-readable data format, consider renaming your requests to be more human-readable.Or as a last resort, input every endpoint’s URL, method, etc. Start from scratch: If you’re starting from scratch, you can import cURL as raw text for each API call.Or, you may discover that community members are sharing unofficial collections documenting your public API. Check with your teammates to see if they have a collection that can provide a starting point for the full-fledged collection. Find a collection: It’s possible someone else has already done the heavy lifting of creating a collection.Once you have a collection, you can automatically generate web-viewable Postman documentation. Generate from an API specification: If you’re using an API specification format, such as OpenAPI, you can import a spec file into Postman to automatically generate a collection.An interactive version of this blog post in a collection called The Good Documentation Checklist 1. You can experience an interactive version of this blog post in The Good Documentation Checklist template, which is comprised of examples from publishers who document their APIs in Postman. In true Postman fashion, I’ve documented these guidelines in a collection. Take a look at this breakdown of nine helpful documentation tips and see how your own process measures up. Still, we can find some shared similarities across good documentation. Since the intended audience is people, and not machines, effectiveness is a subjective measure.

Postman generate api documentation how to#

What is good documentation?Įffective documentation teaches someone how to use your API. Let’s learn from the thousands of publishers who document their APIs in Postman-like Microsoft, Twitter, and Dropbox-and find out what makes their documentation successful. Postman documentation has become widely adopted across the API community because it enables better collaboration and API adoption. Here, I’m going to talk about the traits of good API documentation. While not all collections grow up to be documentation, collections are the foundational building blocks for all Postman documentation viewable on the web. But if in fact it will be standard or abstract, I will link the github project here.I’ve previously talked about the traits of a good collection. I will create a such plugin for the needs of my company but it wont be opensource for now just because it will probably be company-specific. Here is the JSDoc documentation about jsdoc plugins. Finish by binding the article middlewareĪpp.param('articleId', articles.articleByID) * Īpp.route('/api/articles/:articleId').all(articlesPolicy.isAllowed) * Exports a function that defines all routes of the `articles` module, binding it to the express `app` instance. NB: `_.require()` is a project-specific method working as an helper for the native `require()` method, `_` is an object binded to the global context * defines all server routes for the Article resource NB: the following example is not complete, no need of redundancy to illustrate. I think the best way is to find or develop a JSDoc plugin to add new tags to parse customized documentation blocks, combined with native jsdoc tags, like the folowing :