When we couldn’t find an open-source documentation solution that met our high standards and need for programmability, we decided to create our own.
Zudoku is OpenAPI powered, highly customizable, fast to develop with, completely open-source and free for anyone to use to power their API reference and documentation (MIT licensed, go for it!).
Why API documentation matters
API documentation should direct and support developers on their path to using your API effectively. Having good API documentation in place will:
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Enhance your Developer Experience: Detailed explanations, practical code examples, and use cases help developers quickly understand and implement your API. Your docs are commonly the first place a developer will look after discovering your service and they can significantly reduce getting started pains and boost time to “Hello, World!”.
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Accelerate integration: Your docs put everything developers need at their fingertips, making the integration process faster. This accelerated implementation benefits not only the developers but also speeds up the time-to-market for products utilizing your API.
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Reduce support requests: Detailed documentation allows developers to find answers on their own, decreasing the volume of support queries and freeing up your team’s resources to keep building great product.
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Increase adoption rates: APIs that come with clear, thorough documentation are more appealing. In the competitive API landscape, highly functional, readable, great looking documentation will give you the upper hand.
Choosing to implement open-source documentation frameworks like Zudoku can help you develop an API documentation experience that ticks all the right boxes.
Building API documentation with Zudoku
We developed Zudoku to deliver documentation and developer experience that can be powered by an OpenAPI document. At the very minimum all you need to get started is the URL for your OpenAPI document and Zudoku will take care of the
rest.
As of now, Zudoku supports:
- Generating functional interactive API references from one or multiple OpenAPI schema.
- Creating static MDX pages for anything else you want to document.
- A fully integrated playground for every API resource that allows users to test and experiment against your API for real.
- Installable package and CDN hosted versions to suit your development needs.
Try Zudoku with your API
If you’d like to see what your API documentation would look like using Zudoku head over to zudoku.dev and submit the URL for your OpenAPI document, or upload it as a JSON or YAML file.
In return you’ll get a preview of a Zudoku-ized fully functional API reference to play with.
Go ahead, try it. We’ll wait.
If you like it, you can get started developing with Zudoku locally using our generator package:
npx create-zudoku-app@latest
You can also check out this video where I run through installation, configuration, build and deployment of a Zudoku site:
Get involved
As this is an open-source project, we welcome all questions, feedback, issues and pull requests on the project’s GitHub repository.
We will be continuing to dedicate development time to support the project as well as working on it completely in the open, with all issues, updates and decisions being made publicly on GitHub.
Why open-source an API documentation framework?
We believe that the tools you use to document your API should always be free, and because documentation wasn’t the primary reason anyone chose Zuplo, we felt confident about open-sourcing this tool and making it easy for everyone to self-host.
Transparently, we hope that if you use it, you’ll think fondly of Zuplo, and when the time comes for you to evaluate a gateway or API management product, you might consider us.