Build your docs with docfx

• Getting Started
• Contributing
• Roadmap
• License
• .NET Foundation

Build your technical documentation site with docfx, with landing pages, markdown, API reference docs for .NET, REST API and more.

⚠️⚠️⚠️ NOTICE ⚠️⚠️⚠️

DocFX is being transitioned to the .NET Foundation as an official .NET project!

• The DocFX team is working on improving the main branch. This will introduce new features and bug fixes to the project, remove some older code and features that are no longer necessary, as well as update the dependencies and simplify the project structure. Stay tuned for a roadmap.
• Due to architectural changes in the site, DocFX can no longer support building Microsoft Learn content directly. The open source repos holding Markdown content for Microsoft Learn will still accept pull requests and changes, but are not directly buildable with DocFX.
• Moving forward, we will only be supporting this tool as a static site generator for new sites, not as a tool to build official Microsoft content on Microsoft Learn.

Getting Started

1. Install docfx as a global tool:

   dotnet tool install -g docfx

2. Create and start a website locally:

   docfx init -q
   docfx build docfx_project\docfx.json --serve
   

3. Go to https://localhost:8080 to see the sample site.

For more information, refer to Getting Started.

Contributing

Use Discussions for questions and general discussions. Use Issues to report bugs and proposing features.

We welcome code contributions through pull requests, issues tagged as help-wanted are good candidate to start contributing code.

Prerequisites

• Install Visual Studio 2022 (Community or higher) and make sure you have the latest updates.
• Install .NET Core SDK 6.x and 7.x.
• Install NodeJS (18.x.x).
• Optional: Install wkhtmltopdf on Windows to test PDF using choco install wkhtmltopdf.

Build and Test

• Build site templates in templates directory:
  • Run npm install to restore npm dependencies.
  • Run npm run build to build the templates.
• Run dotnet build to build the project or use Visual Studio to build docfx.sln.
• Run dotnet test to test the project or use Visual Studio test explorer.
  • Run git lfs checkout to checkout files for snapshot testing

Branch and Release

The main branch is the default branch for pull requests and most other development activities. We occasionally use feature/* branches for epic feature development.

Releases are based on a stable main branch commit using GitHub Releases. Use of Conventional Commit is encouraged.

Docfx is not released under a regular cadence, new versions arrive when maintainers see enough changes that warrant a new releases. Sometimes we use prereleases to dogfood breaking changes and get feedbacks from the community.

Roadmap

We use Milestones to communicate upcoming changes docfx:

• Working Set are features being actively worked on. Not every features in this bucket will be committed in the next release but they reflect top of minds of maintainers in the upcoming period.

• Backlog is a set of feature candidates for some future releases, but are not being actively worked on.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

.NET Foundation

This project is supported by the .NET Foundation.

This project has adopted the code of conduct defined by the Contributor Covenant to clarify expected behavior in our community. For more information see the .NET Foundation Code of Conduct.