A simple static documentation generator for Protobuf and gRPC contracts.

Demo: You can check out this demo showing the generated documentation for some of the Google Cloud SDK contracts.

In order to build the documentation, you need to generate a binary descriptor from your Proto contracts using protoc. If you don't have it yet, the protoc CLI can be installed by downloading the release from the official protobuf repository.

For example in the folder where your proto files are located, you can execute the following command.

protoc *.proto -o descriptor.pb --include_source_info

(It's important to use the --include_source_info flag, otherwise the comments will not be included in the generated documentation.)

The generated descriptor.pb file will be the input needed to build the documentation site.

Install the sabledocs package. It requires Python (version 3.11 or higher) to be installed.

pip install sabledocs

In the same folder where the generated descriptor.pb file is located, execute the command.

sabledocs

The documentation will be generated into a folder sabledocs_output, its main page can be opened with index.html.

For further customization, create a sabledocs.toml file in the folder where the Protobuf descriptor file is located and from which the sabledocs CLI is executed. You can customize the following options. Any omitted field will use its default value.

# Configures the main title of the documentation site.
# Default value: "Protobuf module documentation"
module-title = "My Awesome Module"

# Specifies the name of the Protobuf descriptor file.
# Default value: "descriptor.pb"
input-descriptor-file = "myawesomemodule.pb"

# Specifies the file which contains the content to display on the main page above the package list.
# Default value: ""
main-page-content-file = "intro.md"

# The output folder to which the documentation is generated.
# Default value: "sabledocs_output"
output-dir = "docs"

# Controls whether the the search functionality is enabled with a prebuilt Lunr index.
# Default value: true
enable-lunr-search = true

# Copyright message displayed in the footer.
# Default value: ""
footer-content = "© 2023 Jane Doe. All rights reserved."

# The following 3 fields configure the source control repository of the project.
# They are used to generate deeplinks for the members of the Proto model pointing to the original source
# code. By default these fields are not configured, and source code links are not included in the docs.
# The repository-type field supports two possible values, "github" and "bitbucket".
# The fields repository-url and repository-branch should be configured to point to the correct repository.
# repository-dir should be set only if the root of your Protobuf module is in a specific directory inside your repository.
repository-type = "github"
repository-url = "https://github.com/janedoe/myawesomeproject"
repository-branch = "main"
repository-dir = "proto"

# In each comment, ignore everything that comes after (until end of the comment) one of the keywords.
# Default value: []
ignore-comments-after = ["@exclude"]
# In each comment, ignore all lines that contain at least one keyword from the following list.
# Default value: []
ignore-comment-lines-containing = ["buf:lint"]

# Packages can be hidden from the generated documentation by adding them to the hidden-packages
# collection. In the templates, the field non_hidden_packages can be used to access the packages which are
# not listed in hidden-packages. (And the packages field returns all packages.)
# Default value: []
hidden-packages = ["google.protobuf"]

# By default, packages and members in a package are ordered alphabetically.
# By setting the member-ordering option to "preserve", the original order present in the Protobuf
# definitions will be preserved.
# When using the "preserve" option and having multiple proto input files, the order of the members will
# depend not just on the physical order in the Protobuf files, but also on the order in which the files
# were listed in the input when `protoc` was executed.
# Default value: ""
member-ordering = "preserve"

# The markdown extensions supported by the main-page-content-file
# Default value: ["fenced_code"]
# See: https://python-markdown.github.io/extensions/#officially-supported-extensions
markdown-extensions = ["fenced_code", "nl2br"]

Custom introduction content can be specified in a separate file, which can be displayed above the packages list on the main page of the documentation.
Then the name of the file has to be specified in the main-page-content-file configuration setting.

main-page-content-file = "intro.md"

See the example on the main page of the demo site.

Extra static content, such as additional HTML files or images can be included in the generated output by creating a directory called static next to the sabledocs.toml file, and copying the static files there. All the files inside the static folder will be copied to the root of the generated output (so there won't be a static subfolder created).

Markdown can be used both in the main content page, and also in the Protobuf comments.
Code blocks can be defined both with indentation, and with the ``` fence.

// These are the comments for SearchRequest
//
// ```
// namespace Test
// {
//     public class Foo {
//         public string Bar { get; set; }
//     }
// }
// ```
message SearchRequest {
  string query = 1;
  int32 page_number = 2;
  int32 results_per_page = 3;
}

(If you include code blocks in a comment, then it's better to use single-line comments (// ...) as opposed to block comments (/* ... */), because the protoc compiler trims all leading whitespace from the lines in block comments, thus the indentation in code blocks gets lost.)

The template-path configuration parameter can be used to specify an alternative directory where the Jinja templates that drive the content of Sabledocs can be found. Copy the contents of the src/sabledocs/templates/_default from the current version of Sabledocs to the configured directory then edit the templates as necessary.

template-path = "templates"

If you would like to include your own Jinja templates, specify the extra-template-path configuration parameter and all files that end in template-path-suffix (default ".html") will be processed and included as a Jinja template in the output path at a location relative to the extra-template-path.

Also processes all subdirectories of extra-template-path recursively.

Prefix a subdirectory with _ to have it ignored.

template-path = "extra-templates"
template-path-suffix = ".tpl" # default value is ".html"

For convenient usage in CI builds and other scenarios where a Docker image is preferable, the image markvincze/sabledocs can be used, which has both the protoc CLI, and sabledocs preinstalled.

Build the Python package:

python -m build

Publish with twine:

python -m twine upload --repository testpypi dist/*

Install from the local folder:

pip install -e .

Build the library and the sample documentation, from the sample folder:

# PowerShell
npm run css-build; pip install ..; sabledocs; .\output\index.html

# Bash
npm run css-build && pip install .. && sabledocs && .\output\index.html