dpSlate helps you create beautiful single-page API documentation. Think of it as an intelligent, responsive documentation template for your API. This variation is based upon the Slate work done by Tripit which in turn was inspired by the API documentation by Stripe.
dpSlate has extensive revisions and enhancements including the integration with dpEngine, the developer portal Software-as-a-Service from DeveloperProgram.com (www.developerprogram.com)
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Clean, intuitive design — with dpSlate, 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 API docs. In addition to the design you see on screen, dpSlate comes with a print stylesheet, so your API 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 linking to a particular point in the documentation is still natural and easy.
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Optional Two Column Layout - would you rather have your code samples inline with the content? With a simple directive you can change the layout such that you get what you want.
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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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Title Page The title of the document is displayed at the very top (but not in the Table of Contents). Below this is a small about button, when you press this the full Title Page is displayed. Title Page data comes from the directives that you place in your Markdown file plus the date of publication is automatically calculated based upon when you built the document.
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Document Search above the table of contents, is a search box that performs search of the entire document. It will tell you how many hits you had and provide a next and prev button to walk you through the results.
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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.
Getting starting with dpSlate 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 [Authoring a API Tutorial Using dpSlate] (build/index.html)
There are two ways to install dpSlate; standalone or with dpEngine.
If you are using dpEngine, no setup is required and all you will need is a browser to connect to your developer program portal.
To install it Standalone, you will need the following pre-requisites:
- Linux, OS X, or Windows will probably work, but is unsupported.
- 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/dpSlate.git cd dpSlate- Install all dependencies:
bundle install - Start the test server:
bundle exec middleman server
Or use the included Dockerfile! (must install Docker first)
docker build -t slate .
docker run -d -p 4567:4567 --name slate -v $(pwd)/source:/app/source slateYou can now see the docs at http://localhost:4567. Whoa! That was fast!
Note: if you're using the Docker setup on OSX, the docs will be availalable at the output of boot2docker ip instead of localhost:4567.
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.
dpSlate v4.1 adds new features that allows improved integration into dpEngine, this was the major goal of v4.1. To achieve this goal, we made it such that dpSlate is:
- based upon the Bootstrap CSS framework from Twitter
- builds directly into the /site directory which is where dpEngine holds its content
- enabled the building of .gsp pages instead of .html pages when dpSlate is running on a dpEngine server.
- enable the ability to create a default
defaults.ymlfile in the/sourcedirectory which will allow you to set your document directives globally for the site. Thus, you will no longer need to bother with YAML directives which do not change from page to page; you just set it in the new defaults.yml. As part of this we changed the name of the directives to make them more consistent.
To enable this to work, we needed to change the way that dpSlate works and as such there will be some conversion that you will need to make some changes to migrate your documents to dpSlate V4.1. You will find this information in the dpSlate Manual in the Release Notes.
dpSlate was forked from TripIt slate and enhanced by Paul Nerger of [DeveloperProgram.com] (http://www.developerprogram.com).
Thanks to the following people who have submitted major pull requests to TripIt Slate:
- Robert Lord who built the original Slate while at TripIt.
- @chrissrogers
- @bootstraponline
- @realityking
- Tripit Slate
- Middleman
- jquery.tocify.js
- middleman-syntax
- middleman-gh-pages
- Font Awesome
- @chrissrogers
- @bootstraponline
- Cisco DevNet who use dpSlate in the great work that they do in supporting Developers.