rustdoc

A tool for documenting Rust.

NOTE: This is not the "real" rustdoc. This is a prototype of a possible replacement. The rustdoc you get with Rust lives in the Rust repo, in the src\librustdoc directory.

Specifically, you can run rustdoc inside the root of a crate, and it will produce HTML, CSS, and Javascript into the target\doc directory. Open target\doc\index.html to check it out.

Project structure

There are three top-level directories that are important: src contains the main source code for rustdoc. However, it will grab HTML, CSS, and JS from the frontend directory, which is where all of that stuff is developed. Finally, the example directory contains a sample crate that you can use to try out rustdoc; we add stuff to it as we add support for various things into rustdoc itself.

The backend

The backend, located in src, is written in Rust. rustdoc is effectively a compiler, but instead of compiling source code to machine code, it compiles source code to JSON. Here's how it does it:

1. It shells out to cargo to generate "save analysis files", which are placed in target\rls.
2. It reads those save analysis files with the rls-analysis crate. As you may be able to guess from the name, this is pretty much why it exists!
3. It goes through the processed information and turns it into a DocData struct that contains the top-level crate information, and the relevant information for everything in the crate.
4. It converts this DocData to JSON, more specifically, JSON API.
5. It writes out this JSON to the target\doc directory of the crate that it's documenting.
6. It writes out some HTML/CSS/JS from the frontend target\doc too.

You can also request it to only write out some of this information through the --emit flag.

The frontend

The frontend is currently implemented with Ember. Its source code is in the frontend directory.

The first thing that the frontend does is in frontend\app\routes\application.js. This route runs before anything else, and it makes a request to grab a data.json file, which is generated by the back end. This loads up all of the docs into ember-data, which drives the rest of the site.

One other slightly unusual aspect of the frontend: normally, you'd have the dist directory ignored, as you don't want to commit generated files. In this case, though, we don't want ember to be a dependency of installing rustdoc, and so we do commit those generated files.

Contributing

We'd love your help with making rustdoc better! It's currently very early days, so there's a lot to do. Here's a quick overview:

1. rustdoc is dual licensed under the MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses, and so contributions are also licensed under both.
2. Contributions go through pull requests to the master branch.
3. Check out the issue tracker to follow the development of rustdoc.

For more details, see the CONTRIBUTING.md file.