JSDoc 3

An inline API documentation processor for JavaScript. JSDoc 3 is intended to be an upgrade to JsDoc Toolkit (JSDoc 2).

Want to contribute to JSDoc? Please read CONTRIBUTING.md.

Installation

Use git to clone the official JSDoc repository:

git clone git@github.com:jsdoc3/jsdoc.git

Alternatively, you can download a .zip file for the latest development version or a previous release.

You can also install JSDoc within a Node.js project's node_modules directory using npm. To install the latest development version, change directories to your Node.js project, then run the following command:

npm install git://github.com/jsdoc3/jsdoc.git

Or to install JSDoc globally:

npm install -g git://github.com/jsdoc3/jsdoc.git

Note: Although you can install JSDoc with npm, JSDoc does not currently run on Node.js.

Usage

This example assumes that your working directory is the JSDoc application base directory:

./jsdoc yourSourceCodeFile.js

For information about the supported command-line options, use the --help option.

./jsdoc --help

Generated documentation will appear in the folder specified by the --destination option, or in a folder named "out" by default.

Dependencies

JSDoc 3 uses the Mozilla Rhino engine, which requires Java. JSDoc 3 is known to work with version 1.6.0_24 of Java.

JSDoc 3 uses advanced features in Mozilla Rhino that are only available in or after version 1.7R3. In addition, JSDoc 3 requires several customizations to the standard Rhino distribution. The customized version of Rhino is included with JSDoc.

In rare cases, users may have their Java CLASSPATH configured to override the included Rhino and point to an older version of Rhino instead. If this is the case, simply correct the CLASSPATH to remove the older Rhino. (On OS X, you may need to remove the file ~/Library/Java/Extensions/js.jar.)

The version of Rhino distributed with JSDoc 3 can be found here: https://github.com/hegemonic/rhino

Debugging

Rhino is not always very friendly when it comes to reporting errors in JavaScript. Luckily, it comes with a full-on debugger included that can be much more useful than a simple stack trace. To invoke JSDoc with the debugger, run the following command on Windows:

jsdoc --debug

Or on OS X, Linux, and other POSIX-compliant systems:

./jsdoc --debug

If you can't get the short-form commands to work, try invoking Java directly:

java -cp lib/js.jar org.mozilla.javascript.tools.debugger.Main \
-debug -modules node_modules -modules rhino -modules lib -modules . \
jsdoc.js your/script.js

Note: --debug must be the first argument to the short-form command.

This will open a debugging window. Click Debug > Break on Exceptions, then click Run. If there is an error, you should see exactly where it is in the source code.

License

JSDoc 3 is free software, licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See the file LICENSE.md in this distribution for more details.

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