scribe/docs/generating-documentation.md

Generating Documentation

To generate your API documentation, use the scribe:generate artisan command.

php artisan scribe:generate

This will:

• extract information about your API and endpoints
• generate documentation about them as a series of Markdown files
• pass these Markdown files to Pastel, which wraps the Markdown files in a HTML, CSS and JavaScript template.

Viewing the generated docs

Accessing your generated docs depends on the type you specified in scribe.php:

• If you're using static type, find the docs/index.html file in your public/ folder and open that in your browser.
• If you're using laravel type, start your app (php artisan serve), then visit /docs.

Postman collection generation

By default, a Postman collection file which you can import into API clients like Postman or Insomnia is generated alongside your docs. You can view it by visiting public/docs/collection.json for static type, and <your-app>/docs.json for laravel type. This link will also be added to the sidebar of your docs.

You can configure Postman collection generation in the postman section of your scribe.php file.

• To turn it off, set the postman.enabled config option to false.

• The base URL used in the Postman collection is the value of config('app.url') by default. To change this, set the value of the postman.base_url key.

• The name of the Postman collection will be derived from config('app.name') by default. To change this, set the value of the title key (not in the postman array). This will also set the title for your docs HTML page.

• You can add descriptions and auth information for the collection in the postman.description and postman.auth keys.

Customising the environment with --env

You can pass the --env option to run this command in a specific env. For instance, if you have a .env.test file, running scribe:generate --env test will make Laravel use that file to populate the env for this comand. This can be very useful to customise the behaviour of your app for documentation purposes and disable things like notifications when response calls are running.

Skipping the extraction phase

If you've modified the generated Markdown, and you only want Scribe to transform it to the normal HTML output, you can use the --no-extraction flag. Scribe will skip extracting data from your routes and go straight to the writing phase, where it converts your Markdown to HTML or Blade. See Advanced Customization.

Overwriting your changes to the Markdown

If you've modified the generated Markdown manually, but you'd like to discard your changes and re-generate based on the data Scribe extracts from your routes, you can pass the --force flag.

Memory Limitations

Generating docs for large APIs can be memory intensive. If you run into memory limits, consider running PHP with an increased memory limit (either by updating your CLI php.ini file or using a CLI flag):

php -d memory_limit=1G artisan scribe:generate

Further customization

Sometimes you need to modify the documentation after it has been generated. See the guide on customization for help on doing that.