PHP API Documentation Maker

A simple yet powerful PHP API documentation generator.

Prerequisites

First of all, you need PHP 5.6 or later to run this tool.

Installation

Clone or download the source code of this tool to some directory, then install dependencies:

php composer.phar self-update
php composer.phar update

Generating the API Reference

Assume you would like to generate the API reference of some library consisting of components. Let's take a real-life example (Zend Framework 3 API reference): https://github.com/olegkrivtsov/zf3-api-reference

Create a directory, for example, zf3-api-reference.

Inside that directory, install all components you need with composer require <component-name>.

Create the php-api-doc-maker.json file with the content like below:

{
    "title": "Zend Framework 3 API Reference",
    "copyright": "(c) 2018 by Oleg Krivtsov",
    "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/",
    "website": "https://olegkrivtsov.github.io/zf3-api-reference/html",
    "keywords": [
        "php",
        "zend framework",
        "api",
        "reference"
    ],
    "links": {
        "Home": "https://olegkrivtsov.github.io/zf3-api-reference/html",
        "Contribute": "https://github.com/olegkrivtsov/zf3-api-reference"
    },
    "components": [
        "zendframework/zend-authentication",
        "zendframework/zend-barcode",
        "zendframework/zend-cache",
        "zendframework/zend-captcha",
        "zendframework/zend-code",
        "zendframework/zend-config",
        "zendframework/zend-console",
        "zendframework/zend-crypt",
        "zendframework/zend-db",
        "zendframework/zend-dom",
        "zendframework/zend-escaper",
        "zendframework/zend-eventmanager",
        "zendframework/zend-filter",
        "zendframework/zend-form",
        "zendframework/zend-http",
        "zendframework/zend-hydrator",
        "zendframework/zend-inputfilter",
        "zendframework/zend-i18n",
        "zendframework/zend-json",
        "zendframework/zend-log",
        "zendframework/zend-mail",
        "zendframework/zend-modulemanager",
        "zendframework/zend-mvc",
        "zendframework/zend-view"
    ],
    "google_analytics": {
        "enabled": true,
        "account_id": "<your-ga-id>"
    },
    "google_adsence": {
        "enabled": true, 
        "upper_ad": "data/upper_ad.js"
    },
    "disqus": {
        "enabled": false,
        "src": "//zf3-api-reference.disqus.com/embed.js"
    }
}

The most important part is the components subkey where you should list the components you want to document.

When this is ready, generate the API reference with the command:

php php-api-doc-maker.php /path/to/zf3-api-reference.

If everything is OK, you should find the HTML files inside the /path/to/zf3-api-reference/html directory.

That's all, enjoy!