yard-chef is a YARD plugin for Chef that adds support for documenting Chef recipes, lightweight resources and providers, libraries and definitions.
It is available from RubyGems:
gem install yard-chef
If you are using Ruby 1.8.x, you need to install Ripper as well:
gem install ripper
The cookbook README file included in your cookbooks will be the landing page for
each cookbook. Under this verbatim inclusion of your README will be a
Cookbook Documentation section that contains the auto-generated information
This plugin grabs most of it's information from the cookbook metadata.rb file. This includes the cookbook version and description, recipe descriptions, attribute names, and attribute descriptions.
The rest of the stuff is parsed from cookbook code itself.
We also need a way to link your providers to their resources. To do so add a
@resource <resource_name> tag in each of your provider code. This tag
should be in a comment separated from other comments, for example:
# This is my super_cool provider
# and it does something cool.
# @resouce super_cool
# Here is the first action
...
Your definitions, libraries, resources and providers can benefit from adding YARD tags and comments for each class and method. You can learn more about the tags from yardoc.org and the list of available tags
Here is an example of adding standard YARD comments to a definition:
# Does a database backup.
#
# @param [String] backup_type If 'primary' will do a primary backup using volumes. If 'secondary' will do a backup S3.
#
# @raise [RuntimeError] If database is not 'initialized'
define :db_do_backup, :backup_type => "primary" do
...
end
Here is an example of adding YARD comments to a light-weight resource:
# Install packages required for application server setup
#
actions :install
# Set of packages to be installed in addition to the base application
# packages
#
attribute :packages, :kind_of => Array
The first comment will add a description for a resource action. The second comment adds a description for a resource attribute. You can also use comments to document your light-weight provider actions.
For generating documentation it is recommended to create a rake task:
require "rubygems"
require "chef"
require "yard"
YARD::Config.load_plugin 'chef'
YARD::Rake::YardocTask.new do |t|
t.files = ['<path_to_cookbooks_repo>/**/*.rb']
#t.options = ['--debug']
end
Then just run
rake yard
From the root of your cookbook repository, run the yardoc command to
generate documentation using the following command
yardoc '**/*.rb' --plugin chef
YARD output will be present in a folder named "doc" which will be located in the same folder from where the command was run.
It is recommended to view these pages from a running YARD server. To start a local YARD server you should be in the same directory that contains your generated ./doc directory. Once there run:
yard server --reload -B localhost -p 8000 --plugin yard-chef
Add a -d option flag to run the server in daemon mode. For more
information about YARD server see http://yardoc.org/
Copyright (c) 2012 RightScale, Inc.
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the 'Software'), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
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