Create a "How to write a typedoc plugin" for boosting community plugins

[nvdnkpr]

I don't know if typedoc is currently plugin-ready, meaning the code structure exporting the right classes and methods for 3rd party developers, but since there already exist a few nice plugins it would be good to have a short "Typedoc plugin 101" so one can write our own plugins in order to boost company.

[ghost]

I would be 100% for this. Making it entirely pluggable would unleash the full power of the community. I'd be willing to give it a few pull requests, as soon as I have a better understanding of the code base.

[Lanfei]

Looking forward to have it.

[BenDevelopment]

Same for me, I'm looking for a way to write a local plugin for my project. It would be nice to specify a single plugin ts file.

[Gerrit0]

You can specify plugins to be loaded with --plugin /absolute/path/to/my-plugin.js

I think this issue needs to wait for a stable release - or at least until the @Component decorator is removed since that will change everything anyways.

[jayarjo]

Any progress on this? Existing plugins get outdated and it becomes hard to figure out what the process for creating one is.

[Gerrit0]

I have started https://typedoc.org/guides/development/, which focuses on developing TypeDoc proper, but will likely be useful for plugin developers.

I am in the middle right now of making library mode a thing, which has required changing quite a lot of the codebase (okay, I admit some didn't have to be changed, but I've wanted to for a while, and while I'm breaking everything anyways....) as a part of this, I'm taking good notes for what plugin developers need to know. I'll publish a hello world of plugin development guide as a draft once it is ready for a PR.

[frog-o]

gerrit0 wrote:

I have started https://typedoc.org/guides/development/, which focuses on developing TypeDoc proper, but will likely be useful for plugin developers.

and

I am in the middle right now of making library mode a thing, which has required changing quite a lot of the codebase (okay, I admit some didn't have to be changed, but I've wanted to for a while,

if it is not to much to ask for can someone explain:

• what typedoc proper is.
• what library mode is
  and
• what need to been done yet to get a full documented plugin guide pushed to main repo (it would be great to have a check list)

IMHO time of arrivals are always frown upon because there almost impossible to get even close but a checklist just show what done and show about the same info.

[Gerrit0]

what typedoc proper is.

The TypeDoc library itself, excluding plugins

what library mode is

TypeDoc 0.19 and earlier had a mode option which determined how it converted your source code. There were two modes, file and modules. file mode would take everything declared in every file in your project and include it in the documentation, and modules mode would take everything declared in every file, but split it up based on the file. These were designed back when people primarily wrote global script files without a module system, so didn't play great with real modules.

Library mode was to be an additional mode which made TypeDoc accept a list of entry points to your library and create documentation based on what was exported from those entry points. I made a couple of attempts at this, the one I was in the middle of above was really a full rewrite of TypeDoc, which I eventually decided was a bad idea and abandoned. To ease the maintenance burden, I dropped the mode option in 0.20, and only supported what was to be called "library mode".

what need to been done yet to get a full documented plugin guide pushed to main repo (it would be great to have a check list)

Mostly, just time to do it, and being convinced that it's a better use of my time than fixing bugs/working on features (when I'm actually working on TypeDoc, have another side project that's more interesting to me right now, so haven't done much on it in the past few weeks). The plugin-idea tag in this issue has a lot of example plugins, which can be helpful.