Extended maintenance of Ruby 1.9.3 ended on February 23, 2015. Read more
RDoc is a Ruby documentation system which contains RDoc::RDoc for generating documentation, RDoc::RI for interactive documentation and RDoc::Markup for text markup.
RDoc::RDoc produces documentation for Ruby source files. It works similarly to JavaDoc, parsing the source and extracting the definition for classes, modules, methods, includes and requires. It associates these with optional documentation contained in an immediately preceding comment block then renders the result using an output formatter.
RDoc::Markup that converts plain text into various output formats. The markup library is used to interpret the comment blocks that RDoc uses to document methods, classes, and so on.
RDoc::RI implements the ri
command-line tool which displays on-line documentation for ruby classes,
methods, etc. ri
features several output formats and an
interactive mode (ri -i
). See ri --help
for
further details.
If you want to use RDoc to create
documentation for your Ruby source files, see RDoc::Markup and refer to rdoc
--help
for command line usage.
If you want to write documentation for Ruby files see RDoc::Parser::Ruby
If you want to write documentation for extensions written in C see RDoc::Parser::C
If you want to generate documentation using rake
see RDoc::Task.
If you want to drive RDoc programmatically, see RDoc::RDoc.
If you want to use the library to format text blocks into HTML, look at RDoc::Markup.
If you want to make an RDoc plugin such as a generator or directive handler see RDoc::RDoc.
If you want to write your own output generator see RDoc::Generator.
Once installed, you can create documentation using the rdoc
command
% rdoc [options] [names...]
For an up-to-date option summary, type
%Q rdoc --help
A typical use might be to generate documentation for a package of Ruby source (such as RDoc itself).
% rdoc
This command generates documentation for all the Ruby and C source files in
and below the current directory. These will be stored in a documentation
tree starting in the subdirectory doc
.
You can make this slightly more useful for your readers by having the index page contain the documentation for the primary file. In our case, we could type
% rdoc --main README.txt
You’ll find information on the various formatting tricks you can use in comment blocks in the documentation this generates.
RDoc uses file extensions to determine how to
process each file. File names ending .rb
and
.rbw
are assumed to be Ruby source. Files ending
.c
are parsed as C files. All other files are assumed to
contain just Markup-style markup (with or without leading '#' comment
markers). If directory names are passed to RDoc, they are scanned recursively for C and Ruby
source files only.
RDoc is currently being maintained by Eric Hodel <drbrain@segment7.net>.
Dave Thomas <dave@pragmaticprogrammer.com> is the original author of RDoc.
The Ruby parser in rdoc/parse.rb is based heavily on the outstanding work of Keiju ISHITSUKA of Nippon Rational Inc, who produced the Ruby parser for irb and the rtags package.
RDoc modifiers for attributes
RDoc modifiers for classes
RDoc modifiers for constants
Name of the dotfile that contains the description of files to be processed in the current directory
General RDoc modifiers
Ruby’s built-in classes, modules and exceptions
RDoc modifiers for methods
RDoc version you are using
Method visibilities
Commenting is here to help enhance the documentation. For example, code samples, or clarification of the documentation.
If you have questions about Ruby or the documentation, please post to one of the Ruby mailing lists. You will get better, faster, help that way.
If you wish to post a correction of the docs, please do so, but also file bug report so that it can be corrected for the next release. Thank you.
If you want to help improve the Ruby documentation, please visit Documenting-ruby.org.