docusaurus-outline-generator

Generate topic files and navigation structure for Docusaurus. It generates Markdown files and sidebars.json file from an outline object.

• Installation
• Usage
• CLI Commands
  • init CLI sub-command
  • generate CLI sub-command
• Generating Docusaurus Documentation with docsog
  • Prerequisites
  • Using docsog to generate documentation

Installation

Install docusaurus-outline-generator globally:

npm install docusaurus-outline-generator -g

After installing it globally, the docsog command is available.

Usage

In your scripts:

const docsog = require("docusaurus-outline-generator")

// create outline object
let docProj = {
    "project": "Sample documentation title",
    "topics": [
        {
            "title": "Getting started",
            "slug": "doc1", // as first topic, use this slug
            "topics": [
                "Installation",
                "Usage",
                {
                    "title": "Topic with children",
                    "topics": [
                        "Child topic #1",
                        "Child topic #2"
                    ],
                    // Add several headers in this topic
                    "headers": [
                        "Adding sub-topics to a topic",
                        "Sub-topics of a sub-topic"
                    ]
                }
                "Updates"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

let options = {
    "topicTitleCase": true,
    "headerTitleCase": false
}

let topics = docProj.topics;

docsog.generate(topics, options);

CLI Commands

docsog provides two sub-commands: init and generate.

Usage: docsog [options] [command]

Options:
  -V, --version                output the version number
  -h, --help                   output usage information

Commands:
  init                         initialize docusaurus outline generator
  generate [options] [source]  generate topic files in docs and navigation in sidebars.json

init CLI sub-command

Run the init sub-command to initialize the folders and files the generate sub-command will use. Typically, you need to run init only once.

docsog init

This command creates template files in the templates folder, the docsog-config.json and docsog-outline.json files. The docsog-config.json contains configuration information, and the docsog-outline.json is the default outline source file. This files contains a demo outline. You can edit it with your preferred documentation outline. You can also create a different outline file and use it in generate sub-command.

generate CLI sub-command

Options for generate sub-command:

Usage: docsog generate [options] [source]

generate topic files in docs and navigation in sidebars.json

Options:
  -r, --remove                remove existing .md files in docs folder
  -d, --docspath <path>       path where documentation documents will be generated (default: "./docs")
  -t, --templatespath <path>  path to templates used during generation (default: "./templates")
  -w, --websitepath <path>    path where sidebars.json will be generated (default: "./website")
  -c, --config <file>         filename or full path to generation configuration file (default: "docsog-config.json")
  -h, --help                  output usage information

Generating Docusaurus Documentation with docsog

Prerequisites

1. Docusaurus installed globally

Using docsog to generate documentation

1. Create a documentation folder

mkdir documentation
chdir documentation

2. Initialize docusaurus

docusaurus-init

3. Initialize docsog

docsog init

This creates the topic.handlebars aad header.handlebars in the templates folder, and docsog-config.json and docsog-outline.json, which is a startup outline document. In this example, you will make no changes to this outline file. You can however, edit it to create your own outline, or create another outline file.

4. Generate documentation based on outline file.

docsog generate

This will generate documentation files in .docs folder and will overide the website/sidebars.json file. sidebars.json contains the documentation navigation structure (see Navigation).

5. View generated documentation outline

You will change to website folder and start the docusaurus preview server -- details at Docusaurus.

cd website
npm start

The browser will open at http://localhost:3000. Click Docs in the top navigation bar to see the documentation.