Table of Contents

Quick Start

Build your technical documentation site with docfx. Converts .NET assembly, XML code comment, REST API Swagger files and markdown into rendered HTML pages, JSON model or PDF files.

Create a New Website

In this section we will build a simple documentation site on your local machine.

Prerequisites

  • Familiarity with the command line
  • Install .NET SDK 6.0 or higher

Make sure you have .NET SDK installed, then open a terminal and enter the following command to install the latest docfx:

dotnet tool update -g docfx

To create a new docset, run:

docfx init

This command walks you through creating a new docfx project under the current working directory. To build the docset, run:

docfx docfx.json --serve

Now you can preview the website on http://localhost:8080.

To preview your local changes, save changes then run this command in a new terminal to rebuild the website:

docfx docfx.json

Publish to GitHub Pages

Docfx produces static HTML files under the _site folder ready for publishing to any static site hosting servers.

To publish to GitHub Pages:

  1. Enable GitHub Pages.
  2. Upload _site folder to GitHub Pages using GitHub actions.

This is an example GitHub action file that publishes documents to the gh-pages branch:

# Your GitHub workflow file under .github/workflows/
# Trigger the action on push to main
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

# Sets permissions of the GITHUB_TOKEN to allow deployment to GitHub Pages
permissions:
  contents: read
  pages: write
  id-token: write

# Allow only one concurrent deployment, skipping runs queued between the run in-progress and latest queued.
# However, do NOT cancel in-progress runs as we want to allow these production deployments to complete.
concurrency:
  group: "pages"
  cancel-in-progress: false
  
jobs:
  publish-docs:
    environment:
      name: github-pages
      url: ${{ steps.deployment.outputs.page_url }}
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - name: Checkout
      uses: actions/checkout@v3
    - name: Dotnet Setup
      uses: actions/setup-dotnet@v3
      with:
        dotnet-version: 8.x

    - run: dotnet tool update -g docfx
    - run: docfx <docfx-project-path>/docfx.json

    - name: Setup Pages
      uses: actions/configure-pages@v3
    - name: Upload artifact
      uses: actions/upload-pages-artifact@v2
      with:
        # Upload entire repository
        path: '<docfx-project-path>/_site'
    - name: Deploy to GitHub Pages
      id: deployment
      uses: actions/deploy-pages@v2

Use the NuGet Library

You can also use docfx as a NuGet library:

<PackageReference Include="Docfx.App" Version="2.73.2" />

Then build a docset using:

await Docfx.Docset.Build("docfx.json");

See API References for additional APIs.

Next Steps

Edit this page