Introduction
Documentation serves a vital role in any software development ecosystem. Documenting your services comes with lots of unique benefits to you and others who will use the product in the future.
Application programming interfaces (API) are everywhere nowadays, but not most of them have documentation stating how to interact with them programmatically. Application programming interfaces can become very demanding, especially when it is not documented correctly.
Documenting your APIs is very handy for your users to get started with speed interacting with the service. On the other hand, documenting your API services will ensure you have a laid-down architecture making it easier to update and maintain.
Documenting your application programming interfaces will ensure you provide the right and necessary information on how to use the API. Properly documenting your APIs will improve your product's user and developer experience.
API Documentation tools
Consider a scenario where you have an existing API service that you want to document; what are some of the available tools at your disposal that you can leverage?
There are lots of documentation tools that you can implement depending on your ready architecture and developer preference.
Swagger tops the list as one of the most commonly used or with the most sub-tool built alongside it. Some other API documentation tools include.
• DapperDox
• SwaggerUI
• ReDoc
• SwaggerHUb
API Specifications
API specification refers to ways that define how we document API. Various specifications dictate the standards and practices in writing and describing API. The most popular specification includes OpenAPI (formerly known as Swagger), RAML (YAML based), and API Blueprint.
• API Blueprint. — A powerful high-level API description language for web APIs. It is built to encourage dialogue and collaboration between project stakeholders, developers, and customers in the API lifecycle.
• OpenAPI (formerly known as Swagger) — The most popular API specification and much easier to use.
• RESTful API Modeling Language (RAML) — is a YAML-based language for describing RESTful APIs. It provides all the information necessary to describe RESTful or practically RESTful APIs. Although designed with RESTful APIs in mind, RAML can describe APIs that do not obey all REST constraints.
When should you document your APIs?
Depending on the project you are building, you may or may not need to document your API. For smaller or personal projects, it may be a question of preference. For larger and open-sourced projects offering various services with many users, it is a better initiative to document your APIs at this point.
I generally believe that when a given API service is being used by various people and on a production level, it is of much more significant advantage to start documenting them. Also, this may be very great to provide you with a scaffold that you can update and maintain as you level up the APIs.
Why should you document your APIs?
What are some of the benefits of documenting your API services? While most people have undocumented production-level APIs, these are some of the benefits of documenting your API services.
• Easier maintenance.
• Saving on support time and costs.
• Improving user and developer experience.
Setting up your first RESTFul API documentation
We will leverage the OpenAPI specification for this purpose as it is the most commonly used API documentation specification. OpenAPI also has a lot of tooling around it with amazing resources on the same to get you up to speed.
API Documentation tooling
You can leverage various API tools that implement OpenAPI specifications. These packages will let us specify the structure of our API either by commenting or through auto-generation. The structure will include the data schema, endpoint description, parameter description, definitions, security, body/query parameters, responses, status codes, and request structure.
- Swagger autogen.
- Swagger-codegen.
This tooling uses a swagger specification under the hood to process all this. The package will generate a swager file that contains all the API documentation info. The auto-generated file will obey the swagger format of OpenAPI specification.
Final thoughts
Application programming interfaces (API) are everywhere nowadays, but not most people care to document them. It is a good software development practice to document such services. Documenting your APIs will heavily help your users and developers who will work on such services in the future.