DocBlox an application that is capable of analyzing your PHP source code and DocBlock comments to generate a complete set of API Documentation.
Inspired by phpDocumentor and JavaDoc it continues to innovate and is up to date with the latest technologies and PHP language features.
DocBlox sports the following:
- PHP 5.3 compatible, full support for Namespaces, Closures and more is provided.
- Shows any tag, some tags add additional functionality to DocBlox (such as @link).
- Processing speed, Zend Framework experienced an 80% reduction in processing time compared to phpDocumentor.
- Low memory usage, peak memory usage for small projects is less than 20MB, medium projects 40MB and large frameworks 100MB.
- Incremental parsing, if you kept the Structure file from a previous run you get an additional performance boost of up to 80% on top of the mentioned processing speed above.
- Easy theme building, if you want to make a branding you only have to call 1 task and edit 3 files.
- Basic command-line compatibility with phpDocumentor, Docblox is an application in its own right but the basic phpDocumentor arguments, such as --directory, --file and --target, have been adopted.
- Two-step process, DocBlox first generates a XML file with your application structure before creating the output. If you'd like you can use that to power your own tools or formatters!
DocBlox requires the following:
- PHP 5.2.6 or higher (might work on 5.2.x as well but this is not supported)
- iconv/ext, http://php.net/manual/en/book.iconv.php (is enabled by default since PHP 5.0.0)
- The XSL extension, http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.xsl.php
- Graphviz (optional, used for generating Class diagrams)
- PEAR (optional, used for generating Class Diagrams or installing via PEAR)
Note:
If you do not want to install the PEAR or Graphviz dependency you are encouraged to generate your own template and make sure that it does not contain anything related to Graph.
An easier solution might be to edit data/themes/default/template.xml file and remove every line containing the word Graph but this will be undone with every upgrade of DocBlox.
Please see the documentation about creating your own templates for more information.
There are 2 ways to install DocBlox:
- Via PEAR (recommended)
- Directly from source (Github)
Please note that it is required that the installation path of DocBlox does not contain spaces. This is a requirement imposed by an external library (libxml)
-
DocBlox is hosted on its own PEAR channel which can be discovered using the following command:
$ pear channel-discover pear.docblox-project.org -
Additionally DocBlox requires the PEAR channels for Zend Framework and the MarkdownExtra library:
$ pear channel-discover pear.zfcampus.org $ pear channel-discover pear.michelf.com -
After that it is a simple matter of invoking PEAR to install the application (since we are still in beta it is required to add that as stability).
$ pear install docblox/DocBlox-beta
- Download the latest released version from http://www.docblox-project.org or if you feel really adventurous you can try the latest unreleased.
- Unzip the downloaded file to the intended destination location.
All dependencies are included in the DocBlox package, so this is really it. You might want to create a symbolic link or batch file from a location in your PATH to make it easier to use but this is not required.
The easiest way to run docblox is by running the following command when installed via PEAR:
$ docblox.php run -d <SOURCE_DIRECTORY> -t <TARGET_DIRECTORY>
or when you did a manual installation:
$ php {INSTALLATION_FOLDER}/bin/docblox.php run -d <SOURCE_DIRECTORY> -t <TARGET_DIRECTORY>
This command will parse the source code provided using the -d argument and
output it to the folder indicated by the -t argument.
DocBlox supports a whole range of options to configure the output of your documentation. You can execute the following command, or check our website, for a more detailed listing of available command line options.
$ docblox run -h
DocBlox also supports the use of configuration files (named docblox.xml or docblox.dist.xml by default). Please consult the documentation to see the format and supported options.
For more detailed information you can check our online documentation at http://www.docblox-project.org/documentation.
- Search does not work / is not available when accessing the documentation locally from Google Chrome. Google Chrome blocks access to local files (and thus the search index) using Javascript when working with local files (file://); it is not possible for us to fix this.
- DocBlox must be installed in a path without spaces due to restrictions in libxml. The XSL transformation will throw all kinds of odd warnings if the path contains spaces.
To come in contact is actually dead simple and can be done in a variety of ways.
- Twitter: @DocBlox
- Website: http://www.docblox-project.org
- IRC: Freenode, #docblox
- Github: http://www.github.com/mvriel/docblox
- E-mail: mike.vanriel@naenius.com