shins

Shins Is Not Slate

Beautiful static documentation for your API.

Shins is a port of Slate to Javascript / Nodejs, and would not be possible without all of that hard work.

Version numbers of Shins aim to track the version of Slate they are compatible with.

Usage

• Fork the repository
• Clone the fork
• Edit source/index.html.md
• npm install
• node shins.js or
  • node shins.js --minify or
  • node shins.js --customcss or
  • node shins.js --inline or
  • node shins.js --unsafe or
  • node shins.js --no-links
• To add custom logo add --logo option with path to your logo image.
• To make the logo image link to a webpage, add --logo-url option with URL to link to.
• To specify a different output filename from the default ./index.html, use the --output or -o option.
• To allow css-style attributes in markdown, specify the --attr option.
• To check locally: node arapaho and browse to localhost:4567 - changes to your source .html.md files and the source/includes directory will automatically be picked up and re-rendered. If you use --launch or -l your default browser will be opened automatically
• Add, commit and push
• Then (in your fork) press this button

Or, to deploy to GitHub Pages:

• Change the setting on your fork so Github Pages are served from the root directory
• Browse to https://{yourname}.github.io/{repository-name}

To deploy to your own web-server:

If you use the option --minify to shins, the only things you need to take to your web host is the generated index.html and the contents of the pub directory, which should be kept relative to it, so the structure is always:

{whatever}/index.html
{whatever}/pub/css/
{whatever}/pub/js/

If you use the --inline option to shins, then everything is bundled into the index.html file and no pub directory is required. Fonts are by default loaded from this github repository, but this can be overridden with the --fonturl option.

API

const shins = require('shins');
let options = {};
options.cli = false; // if true, missing files will trigger an exit(1)
options.minify = false;
options.customCss = false;
options.inline = false;
options.unsafe = false; // setting to true turns off markdown sanitisation
options['no-links'] = false; // if true, do not automatically convert links in text to anchor tags
//options.source = filename; // used to resolve relative paths for included files
shins.render(markdownString, options, function(err, html) {
  // ...
});

or, with Promises:

const shins = require('shins');
let options = {};
options.cli = false; // if true, missing files will trigger an exit(1)
options.minify = false;
options.customCss = false;
options.inline = false;
options.unsafe = false; // setting to true turns off markdown sanitisation
options['no-links'] = false; // if true, do not automatically convert links in text to anchor tags
//options.source = filename; // used to resolve relative paths for included files
options.logo = './my-custom-logo.png';
options['logo-url'] = 'https://www.example.com';
shins.render(markdownString, options)
.then(html => {
  // ...
});

The err parameter is the result of the ejs rendering step.

Setting customCss to true will include the pub/css/screen_overrides.css,pub/css/print_overrides.css and pub/css/theme_override.css files, in which you can override any of the default Slate theme, to save you from having to alter the main css files directly. This should make syncing up with future Shins / Slate releases easier.

Setting inline to true will inline all page resources (except resources referenced via CSS, such as fonts) to output html. This way HTML can be used stand-alone, without needing any other resources. It will also set minify to true.

Set logo path to add your custom logo as absolute path or path relative to process working directory. If inline option is on image will be inlined, else it will be copied to source/images directory and included via src image attribute.

Set logo-url if you want the logo image to link to a webpage.

CLI usage via api2html (third-party)

You can also use the third-party api2html CLI wrapper around Shins/Widdershins:

$ # Install globally
$ npm install api2html -g
$ # Display the api2html help
$ api2html --help
$ # Simple usage
$ api2html -o api.html api.yml

Updating from Slate

• Note: changes to Slate CSS, Javascript etc may break assumptions made in Shins. Use at your own risk.
• The script updateFromSlate assumes you have Ruby Slate checked-out by the side of shins (i.e. in a sibling directory) and will copy .scss files, fonts, Javascript files etc.
• The buildstyle.js program can be used to process the .scss files to their .css equivalents. It takes one optional parameter, the outputStyle used by node-sass. This can be either nested, expanded, compact or compressed. Default is nested.

Notes

• Windows is definitely supported
• Syntax highlighting in 176 languages and 79 themes (you can specify the highlighter theme to use by setting highlighter_theme in your slate markdown header)
• Multiple language tabs per language are supported
• Static TOC as per Slate v2.0
• GitHub emoji shortcuts are supported
• For converting OpenAPI / Swagger or AsyncAPI definitions to Shins or Slate, see widdershins
• arapaho has a --preserve or -p option which will not overwrite your .html output file, but still re-render when necessary
• Shins ships with an alternate theme by TradeGecko which is also under the Apache 2.0 license
• Shins additionally supports AsciiDoc include::filename[] syntax as well as !INCLUDE filename from markdown-pp - this is not supported by Slate

Shins in the wild

Please feel free to add a link to your API documentation here

• APIs.guru OpenAPI specification extensions (Semoasa) documentation
• Signal Biometrics Ox documentation
• LeApp daemon API