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

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:
  actions: 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: Upload artifact
      uses: actions/upload-pages-artifact@v3
      with:
        # Upload entire repository
        path: '<docfx-project-path>/_site'
    - name: Deploy to GitHub Pages
      id: deployment
      uses: actions/deploy-pages@v4

Use the NuGet Library

You can also use docfx as a NuGet library:

<PackageReference Include="Docfx.App" Version="2.77.0" />
<!-- the versions of Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.* must match exactly what Docfx.App was built against, not the latest stable version -->
<PackageReference Include="Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.Workspaces.MSBuild" Version="4.10.0" />
<PackageReference Include="Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.CSharp.Workspaces" Version="4.10.0" />

Then build a docset using:

await Docfx.Dotnet.DotnetApiCatalog.GenerateManagedReferenceYamlFiles("docfx.json");
await Docfx.Docset.Build("docfx.json");

See API References for additional APIs.

How to use prerelease version of docfx

Docfx publishes nightly builds to GitHub Packages. If you want to use prerelease version, you can install package with following steps.

Prerequisite

  1. Install GitHub CLI command.
  2. Install PowerShell 7.x or later.

Steps

  1. Open PowerShell on working directory.

  2. Login to GitHub with additional scope request

    gh auth login --scopes "read:packages" --hostname github.com

  3. Follow the instructions and complete the login steps.

  4. Download docfx nuget package from GitHub Packages

    # Gets Access Token
$token = gh auth token

# Gets the version of latest nightly build
$version = gh api /orgs/dotnet/packages/nuget/docfx/versions --jq '.[0].name'

# Gets nupkg download URL.
$downloadUrl = "https://nuget.pkg.github.com/dotnet/download/docfx/${version}/${version}.nupkg"

# Download nupkg to current directory.
Write-Host ('Download nupkg from: {0}' -f $downloadUrl)
Invoke-RestMethod -Method Get -Uri $downloadUrl -OutFile "docfx.${version}.nupkg" -Headers @{
  Authorization = "Bearer $token"
}

  5. Install docfx as .NET Global Package from local source

    dotnet tool update docfx -g --prerelease --source ./

Next Steps

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