gdscript-docs-maker 1.5.1
Create documentation and class references from your Godot GDScript code.
License: MIT
Requires Python: >=3.7
Keywords: godot,gdscript,documentation,reference,godotengine

# GDScript Docs Maker

![Project banner](./assets/gdscript-docs-maker-banner.svg)

Docs Maker is a set of tools to convert documentation you write inside your code to an online or offline code reference in the markdown format.

If you make plugins or a framework for Godot, GDScript Docs Maker will help you save a lot of time documenting your code.

It creates documents following Godot's built-in class reference. You can see an example with our [Godot Steering Toolkit documentation](https://www.gdquest.com/docs/godot-steering-toolkit/reference/)

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**Table of Contents**

- [Installing](#installing)
- [Getting Started](#getting-started)
  - [Writing your code reference](#writing-your-code-reference)
  - [Generating the markdown files](#generating-the-markdown-files)
- [Hugo output](#hugo-output)
- [The manual way](#the-manual-way)
  - [Converting JSON](#converting-json)

<!-- markdown-toc end -->

**Note**: This program requires Godot 3.2+ and Python 3.7+ to work.

## Installing

You can install the GDScript Docs Maker python package with pip:

```bash
# On Linux and MacOS:
python3 -m pip install gdscript_docs_maker

# On Windows, if you installed Python 3.7+, you can use:
python -m pip install gdscript_docs_maker
```

Although to use the shell script that simplifies creating the reference, `generate_reference`, you need to clone this repository. More on that below.

## Getting Started

In this section, you will learn to use the program to generate a code reference quickly.

This involves two steps. You need to:

1. Write docstrings inside your GDScript code.
2. Use one of the shell programs that ships with this add-on.

### Writing your code reference

Docstring or doc-comments in GDScript don't have any special markup.

You can document classes, properties, and functions with comment blocks placed on the line before their definition:

```gdscript
# A linear and angular amount of acceleration.
class_name GSTTargetAcceleration


# Linear acceleration
var linear: = Vector3.ZERO
# Angular acceleration
var angular: = 0.0


# Resets the accelerations to zero
func reset() -> void:
	linear = Vector3.ZERO
	angular = 0.0
```

If you need long docstrings, you can use multiple commented lines:

```
# A specialized steering agent that updates itself every frame so the user does
# not have to using a KinematicBody2D
# category: Specialized agents
extends GSAISpecializedAgent
class_name GSAIKinematicBody2DAgent
```

### Generating the markdown files

We wrote two shell scripts to automate the steps in generating a code reference: `./generate_reference` for Linux or MacOS, and `./generate_reference.bat` for Windows.

Use either of them to quickly generate your code reference:

```bash
Generate a code reference from GDScript
Usage:
generate_reference $project_directory [options]

Required arguments:

$project_directory -- path to your Godot project directory.
This directory or one of its subdirectories should contain a
project.godot file.

Flags:

-h/--help             -- Display this help message.
-o/--output-directory -- directory path to output the documentation into.
-f/--format           -- Either `markdown` or `hugo`. If `hugo`, the output document includes a TOML front-matter at the top. Default: `markdown`.
-a/--author           -- If --format is `hugo`, controls the author property in the TOML front-matter.
```

To use them:

- You need to clone this repository or download the source code from a [stable release](https://github.com/GDQuest/gdscript-docs-maker/releases).
- You need `godot` to be available on the [system PATH variable](<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PATH_(variable)>).

## Hugo output

You can output markdown files for [hugo](https://gohugo.io/), the static website engine.

To do so, call GDScript docs maker with the `--format hugo` option. You can use two extra flags with this:

```bash
--date YYYY-MM-DD, the date in iso format, if you want the documents to have a date other than today. Default: datetime.date.today()
--author author_id, the id of the author on your hugo website, to assign an the author for the documents. Default: ""
```

Here's how I generate the Godot Steering Toolkit's documentation. This command outputs the class reference straight into the website:

```bash
python3 -m gdscript_docs_maker $HOME/Repositories/godot-steering-toolkit/project/reference.json --format hugo --author razoric --path $HOME/Repositories/website/content/docs/godot-steering-toolkit/reference/classes/
```

## The manual way

If you want to generate the JSON and convert it manually, there are three steps involved:

1. Copying the GDScript files `./godot-scripts/Collector.gd` and `./godot-scripts/ReferenceCollectorCLI.gd` or `./godot-scripts/ReferenceCollectorCLI.gd` to your Godot 3.2 project.
2. Running the GDScript code with Godot, either from the editor (`ReferenceCollector.gd`) or by calling Godot from the command line (`ReferenceCollectorCLI.gd`).
3. Running `gdscript_docs_maker` on the reference.json file that Godot generated in the previous step.

<!-- TODO: turn into a note block on the website. -->

**Note**: to parse and collect data from GDScript code, we rely on the GDScript language server that's new in Godot 3.2.

### Converting JSON

Call the `gdscript-docs-maker` package directly using the `python -m` option:

```
Usage: gdscript_docs_maker [-h] [-p PATH] [-v] [--dry-run] files [files ...]

Merges or converts json data dumped by Godot's GDScript language server to
create a code reference.

positional arguments:
  files                 A list of paths to JSON files.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            Show this help message and exit.
  -p PATH, --path PATH  Path to the output directory.
  -v, --verbose         Set the verbosity level. For example, -vv sets the
                        verbosity level to 2. Default: 0.
  --dry-run             Run the script without creating
                        files and folders. For debugging purposes.
```

The program takes a list of JSON files. For example, we generate the code reference of our AI framework [Godot Steering Toolkit](https://github.com/GDQuest/godot-steering-toolkit/) like so with the shell:

```fish
python -m gdscript-docs-maker ~/Repositories/godot-steering-toolkit/src/reference.json
```

# Changelog

This document lists new features, improvements, changes, and bug fixes in every GDScript docs maker release.

## GDScript Docs Maker 1.5.1

### Bug fixes

- Fixed `make build` setuptools build by using `src` layout
- Fixed `pip install` installation workflow (tested locally, PyPi package needs to be updated) - Related issue: [#76](https://github.com/GDQuest/gdscript-docs-maker/issues/76)
- Fixed `generate_reference` not finding any file when using -d option (may fix [issue #63](https://github.com/GDQuest/gdscript-docs-maker/issues/63))

## GDScript Docs Maker 1.5.0

### New Features

- Added support for constants by @db0.

### Bug fixes

- Fixed descriptions eating whitespace and flattening nested lists. By @db0.

## GDScript Docs Maker 1.4.0

### New Features

- Added support for inner classes.
  - _Known limitation: the program only supports one nesting level at the moment. This is in part
    because by writing them recursively, we would not have enough heading levels (web pages support
    6, we are already using 5). Also, we haven't found a project that used that GDScript feature
    yet, nesting sub-classes._
- The shell program `get_reference` now supports command line flags.
- You can specify directories of the Godot project to parse with `get_reference` and the
  `-d/--directory` option.

### Improvements

- There is now a `-V/--version` flag to print the version number.
- Improved the shell program `get_reference`'s code to better report errors and work by calling
  `./get_reference`
- Setter and getter functions now render as a bullet-point list with the member variable they belong to.

### Changes

- Headings now generate only with leading hashes `#` instead of being wrapped in hashes.
- The syntax for tags and other special information now is like JSDoc: `@tags - tag1, tag2, tag3`.
  This differentiates special markup or metadata from the regular docstring. There is also a
  discussion to [adopt markup like this](https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/177)
  in Godot.

### Bug fixes

- Fixed an error when using the `--format hugo` option.
- Added the relative "../" to links to Fixed links leading to 404 pages.
- Fixed table for setters and getters rendering as plain text with some markdown parsers.
- Fixed function call error in `ReferenceCollector.gd`.

## GDScript Docs Maker 1.3.0

### Features

- Create an **index page** with a table of contents. To do so, use the new
  command-line option `--make-index`. This generates an extra `index.md` file.
- You can now **link between classes**, including to specific methods and
  properties:
  - Write `[ClassName]`, `[ClassName.symbol]`, or `[symbol_in_this_class]` and
    docs maker will replace it with a link to the corresponding page and
    heading.
- Add support for the **class category**`metadata: this allows you to group classes by categories. Add a line with`# category: My Category` in your
  class's docstring to register a category for it.
- Classes now show all ancestors they extend, and the extends list links to
  the reference of parent classes.
- Store and write key project information: name, description, and human-readable
  version string.
  - We get them from the Application Settings in your Godot project.
  - For the project version, in 3.2.0, you need to add it yourself as
    `application/config/version. It must be with the form "1.0.0". Future or
    more recent Godot versions should have this defined by default. Upon
    exporting your game, Godot should also use this version number.

### Improvements

- The Windows `generate_reference.bat` command-line script now supports
  command-line flags and arguments. The script also now checks for and prevents
  common errors.
- Remove `extends` line if the class doesn't extend any type.
- Remove properties summary and methods summary if the class respectively
  doesn't have public properties or methods.

### Changes

- Changed the default export directory to "export", as we use "dist" to build
  the program's pip package itself.

## GDScript Docs Maker 1.2.1

### Changes

- Move the pip package's configuration to `setup.cfg`.
  - The setup now automatically finds packages and data.
  - This improves type checks and imports with mypy.

### Bug fixes

- The tool now outputs regular markdown code blocks instead of hugo shortcodes by default.
- The `Collector.gd` script you can run from Godot's editor now rebuilds the language server cache so you don't need to restart Godot to rebuild the JSON class data.
- Fixed an error in markdown conversion when the Godot Language Server generates empty classes in the generated JSON file.
  - If a class doesn't have a name, docs maker will now skip it.

## GDScript Docs Maker 1.2

_In development_

### Features

- Add code highlighting to the `hugo` output format.
- Add `--date` and `--author` command line flags for the hugo front matter output.
- Add support for the `abstract` tag, for abstract base classes.
- Add GDScript code highlighting for the hugo export format.
- Add support for enums.

### Improvements

- The documents now only have 1 empty line betweens paragraphs, headings, etc. instead of 2 to 4.

## GDScript Docs Maker 1.1

### Features

- New output format for the static website engine [hugo](https://gohugo.io/) with toml front-matter. Use the `--format hugo` option to select it.
- New `--dry-run` command-line option to output debug information.

### Bug fixes

- Use code blocks for functions instead of inline code.

## GDScript Docs Maker 1.0

This is the initial release of the program. It can collect and generate a code reference from your Godot GDScript projects.

### Features

- Parses and collects docstrings from GDScript files, using Godot 3.2's Language Server. Outputs the data as JSON.
- Converts the JSON data to markdown files.
  - Writes methods, static functions, signals, member variables, and class data.
  - Only writes relevant sections. For example, the tool only creates a "Method Descriptions" section if there are methods in the class.
  - Skips built-in callbacks, i.e. `_process`, `_input`, etc.
  - Skips the constructor, `_init`, unless it has arguments.
  - Skips private functions and member variables, unless tagged as virtual.
- Supports tags in the source code with the `tags:` keyword followed by comma-separated strings, like `tags: virtual, deprecated`.
  - Currently, the program only takes `virtual` into account, but it does store all the tags.
- There are two shell scripts for POSIX shells (sh, bash, etc.) and Windows CMD, respectively. Use them to generate your code reference instantly.