ExDoc

ExDoc is a tool to generate documentation for your Elixir projects. In case you are looking for documentation for Elixir itself, check out Elixir's website.

Using ExDoc with Mix

To use ExDoc in your Mix projects, first add ExDoc as a dependency:

def deps do
  [{:earmark, "~> 0.1", only: :dev},
   {:ex_doc, "~> 0.11", only: :dev}]
end

After adding ExDoc as a dependency, run mix deps.get to install it.

ExDoc will automatically pull in information from your project, like the application and version. However, you may want to set :name, :source_url and :homepage_url to have a nicer output from ExDoc, for example:

def project do
  [app: :repo,
   version: "0.1.0-dev",
   name: "REPO",
   source_url: "https://github.com/USER/REPO",
   homepage_url: "http://YOUR_PROJECT_HOMEPAGE",
   deps: deps,
   docs: [logo: "path/to/logo.png",
          extras: ["README.md", "CONTRIBUTING.md"]]]
end

Now you are ready to generate your project documentation with mix docs.

To see all options available when generating docs, run mix help docs. You may have to do mix docs or mix deps.compile first.

Using ExDoc via command line

You can ExDoc via the command line as follows:

1. First clone and compile it:

    git clone https://github.com/elixir-lang/ex_doc.git
    cd ex_doc
    mix do deps.get, compile
   

2. Then you are ready to use it in your projects. First move into your project directory and ensure it is compiled:

    cd PATH_TO_YOUR_PROJECT
    mix compile
   

3. Next invoke the ex_doc executable from your project:

    PATH_TO_YOUR_EXDOC/bin/ex_doc "PROJECT_NAME" "PROJECT_VERSION" path/to/project/ebin -m "PROJECT_MODULE" -u "https://github.com/GITHUB_USER/GITHUB_REPO" -l path/to/logo.png
   

For example, here are some acceptable values:

PROJECT_NAME    => Ecto
PROJECT_VERSION => 0.1.0
PROJECT_MODULE  => Ecto (the main module provided by the library)
GITHUB_USER     => elixir-lang
GITHUB_REPO     => ecto

Changing the Markdown tool

In the examples above, we have used Earmark to convert Markdown to HTML. If you prefer, you can also use pandoc or hoedown (in C):

• Install pandoc - which is available in multiple package managers and provides installers for different operating systems. Pandoc must be installed just once and it will be used for all projects;

• To use hoedown - add http://github.com/devinus/markdown as a dependency to your project as: {:markdown, github: "devinus/markdown"}

Then add the entry:

config :ex_doc, :markdown_processor, ExDoc.Markdown.Pandoc  # or ExDoc.Markdown.Hoedown

to your config/config.exs file.

License

ExDoc source code is released under Apache 2 License. The generated contents, however, are under different licenses based on projects used to help render html, including css, js and other assets.

Check the LICENSE file for more information.