Slate helps you create beautiful single-page API documentation. Think of it as an intelligent, modern documentation template for your API.
The example above was created with Slate. Check it out at tripit.github.io/slate.
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Clean, intuitive design — with Slate, the description of your API is on the left side of your documentation, and all the code examples are on the right side. Inspired by Stripe's and Paypal's API docs. In addition to the design you see on screen, Slate comes with a print stylesheet, so your docs look great on paper.
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Everything on a single page — gone are the days where your users had to search through a million pages to find what they wanted. Slate puts the entire documentation on a single page. We haven't sacrificed linkability, though. As you scroll, your browser's hash will update to the nearest header, so it's insanely easy to link to a particular point in the documentation.
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Slate is just Markdown — when you write docs with Slate, you're just writing Markdown, which makes it simple to edit and understand. Everything is written in Markdown — even the code samples are just Markdown code blocks!
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Write code samples in multiple languages — if your API has bindings in multiple programming languages, you easily put in tabs to switch between them. In your document, you'll distinguish different languages by specifying the language name at the top of each code block, just like with Github Flavored Markdown!
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Out-of-the-box syntax highlighting for almost 60 languages, no configuration required.
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Automatic, smoothly scrolling table of contents on the far left of the page. As you scroll, it displays your current position in the document. It's fast, too. We're using Slate at TripIt to build documentation for our new API, where our table of contents has over 180 entries. We've made sure that the performance remains excellent, even for larger documents.
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Let your users update your documentation for you — by default, your Slate-generated documentation is hosted in a public Github repository. Not only does this mean you get free hosting for your docs with Github Pages, but it also makes it's simple for other developers to make pull requests to your docs if they find typos or other problems. Of course, if you don't want to, you're welcome to not use Github and host your docs elsewhere!
Getting starting with Slate is super easy! Simply fork this repository, and then follow the instructions below. Or, if you'd like to check out what Slate is capable of, take a look at the sample docs.
You're going to need:
- Ruby, version 1.9.3 or newer
- Bundler — If Ruby is already installed, but the
bundlecommand doesn't work, just rungem install bundlerin a terminal.
- Fork this repository on Github.
- Clone your forked repository (not our original one) to your hard drive with
git clone https://github.com/YOURUSERNAME/slate.git cd slate- Install all dependencies:
bundle install - Start the test server:
bundle exec middleman server
You can now see the docs at http://localhost:4567. And as you edit source/index.md, your server should automatically update! Whoa! That was fast!
Now that Slate is all set up your machine, you'll probably want to learn more about editing Slate markdown, or how to publish your docs.
Just submit a issue to the Slate Github if you need any help. And, of course, feel free to submit pull requests with bug fixes or changes.