EmberCLI
AddonDocs

EmberCLI AddonDocs

Easy, beautiful docs for your OSS Ember addons

Group 2 Copy 2 Motivation

Documenting software libraries has gotten easier. We have nicely-formatted README.md files, the ability to host custom sites for free on GitHub Pages, and even dedicated tools like GitBook and ReadTheDocs. But even though these tools have come a long way, modern developers have high expectations, and library authors can quickly find themselves juggling more tasks than they can manage.

Ember addons occupy a unique space here. Besides everything that's expected of any modern JavaScript library, there's even more that goes into authoring a library that plays nicely with an ecosystem as mature as Ember's. And too often addon authors with limited time must choose between being a better community citizen, or focusing on the core problem their library was created to solve in the first place.

These days, a well-maintained Ember addon should

  • Provide interactive demos of their components in the context of an Ember app
  • Show current and versioned guides, ideally whose content is verified by automated tests
  • Show current and versioned API documentation derived from structured comments in source code
  • Have excellent test coverage across a matrix of Ember and Ember CLI versions
  • Make it easy for contributors to correct documentation errors in addition to submitting code fixes

Looking at the available tools for authoring docs, none proved satisfactory for all these needs. This is why addons deserve their own solution.