njsdoc Dockerfile

A handy dockerfile for running njsdoc to document some code. Use it as-is or extend it via FROM and do something else.

What is njsdoc?

njsdoc is a JavaScript code document generator. All document generators read the code and do some analysis. Most read the code directly as it is stored at rest in the file system, a job commonly referred to as static analysis. njsdoc executes the code in a modified Rhino environment and analyzes it at runtime. This allows a lot of JavaScript's run-time beauty to shine through, without needing to code a certain way or annotation with arcane syntax in weird ways.

What is Docker?

Docker is an open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications. It is used here to wrap njsdoc itself and it's dependencies - namely Java - into a single container that can be used as an application with the only dynamic dependency being the code to document.

How can I use this?

This image assumes that you have some JavaScript source code to document.

This image is designed so that this code to document is mounted as a volume into a container and then read.

1. Install Docker
2. Download this image

• docker pull r4j4h/njsdoc
• Or to manually build this image:
  • Download https://github.com/r4j4h/njsdoc-dockerfile
  • docker build -t="r4j4h/njsdoc:0.0.7" .

3. Run a container from this image with your code:

• Assuming a folder /path-to-your-code/ exists with a my-source.js file...
• docker run --rm -v /path-to-your-code:/code_in r4j4h/njsdoc:0.0.7 /code_in/my-source.js --markdown
  • This tells docker to clean up this container when we are done so we do not pile up used containers.
  • We link a local volume, which should be pointed to your code
  • Notice we can pass in any normal arguments as per njsdoc's documentation
• njsdoc by default returns the output via stdout.
• njsdoc provides output control options - in this case we still want docker to clean up the container, but we want to keep the output. - docker run --rm -v ./path-to-your-code:/code_in -v /desired-path-to-your-docs:/docs <image> r4j4h/njsdoc:0.0.7 /code_in/my-source.js --markdown --out /docs/my-source.md - This is the same command as before, modified slightly: - We link another local volume, which should be pointed to where you want your generated code to go. - We have added --out /docs to inform jsdoc to not push out to stdout but to write to our destined file system meeting point.