how to use appledoc to generate an Apple-like documentations

Question

I am reading on the article how to generate an Apple-like HTML documentation at here. My questions are what the command lines are used for. How can we combine command lines and appledoc xcode project to generate a HTML.

Answer 1

I'm the author of appledoc tool. The tool is intended to be used as answered by Caleb above. Recommended installation method is to clone repository from GitHub, open project in Xcode, build and optionally copy binary to your path as suggested above. Additionally, you must also copy template files required for running the tool to one of predefined paths. All the steps required are described in the readme file on appledoc page on GitHub, see Quick Install section.

There are also other methods for installing - all contribution from users:

• You can use install-appledoc.sh script included in the git repository.
• There's also homebrew recipe available, although it doesn't install template files to my understanding (see this link).

For any additional questions go to appledoc Google group. I just created it few days ago, so there's no content at the moment of this writing, but feel free to ask questions there.

Answer 2

I haven't used 'appledoc', but from a quick look at the page you linked it appears that it's an open-source command-line utility. So the first step will be to compile the 'appledoc' program itself, and then stick it in a directory that's in your path, such as /usr/local/bin or ~/bin/.

The next step is to try to use it to generate some documentation (assuming that you've already created the markdown files that it consumes). Open a terminal window, navigate to the directory where your files are, and then use the command given at the top of the page that you linked:

appledoc --project-name appledoc --project-company "Gentle Bytes" --company-id com.gentlebytes --output ~/help .

If you want to use 'appledoc' to regenerate your documentation every time you build some project, you can add a "Run Script" build phase to an existing target in your project, or create a new target just for documentation that has nothing but a "Run Script" build phase. Either way, the script in that phase should be shell script containing a command similar to the one above (though you'll probably want to specify the source directory explicitly rather than just using the 'current' directory, i.e. .).