TypeDoc Documentation

TypeDoc provides several features for generating high-quality documentation from TypeScript source code:

• Automatic Documentation: Captures all exported variables, functions, classes, and more.
• Markdown Support: Allows you to use Markdown syntax within your doc comments for rich text formatting.
• Syntax Highlighting: Automatically provides syntax highlighting for code blocks within your documentation.
• Language Construct Support: Built-in support for various TypeScript constructs including generics, overloads, interfaces, enums, and React components.

TypeDoc provides several categories of options to customize documentation generation:

• Configuration Options: Control which files TypeDoc reads.
• Input Options: Control how input source code is converted into a project structure for HTML or JSON rendering.
• Output Options: Control the generation and appearance of TypeDoc's HTML output.
• Comment Options: Control how TypeDoc parses code comments and documentation blocks.
• Organization Options: Control how content is organized within the converted project.
• Validation Options: Configure the validation checks performed on the converted project.
• Other Options: Miscellaneous settings.

The {@inheritDoc} tag allows you to create documentation for a reflection by copying it from another reflection. This is useful for interfaces or classes that implement or extend existing structures and should share the same documentation.

The tag follows the form {@inheritDoc ref}, where ref is a declaration reference to the source documentation.

Copied Elements: Following the TSDoc specification, only the following parts are copied:

• The summary
• The @remarks block
• Any @param blocks
• Any @typeParam blocks
• The @returns block

/**
 * Some documentation
 */
export class SomeClass {}

/** {@inheritDoc SomeClass} */
export interface SomeUnrelatedClass {}

To include literal characters that normally trigger parsing (like {, }, @, or /), use a backslash \ to escape them. All other escapes are passed through to markdown-it for processing. This is particularly useful for escaping the end of a comment block (e.g., \*/) when documenting code that contains its own comment blocks.

/**
 * This is not a \@tag. Nor is this an \{\@inlineTag\}
 *
 * It is possible to escape the end of a comment:
 * ```ts
 * /**
 *  * docs for `example()`
 * \*/
 * function example(): void
 * ```
 */

You can attach standalone .md files to specific types (classes, functions, etc.) by using the @document tag in their doc comments. The path provided must be relative to the file containing the comment.

/**
 * @document documents/external-markdown.md
 */

If your codebase consists of multiple npm packages, you can build documentation for each individually and merge them into a single site. To do this, set the entryPointStrategy option to packages.

Note: In this mode, TypeDoc requires configuration to be present in each directory to specify the entry points.

The @remarks tag is a block tag used to separate a brief summary from more detailed, extensive documentation within a comment.

Key behaviors:

• Limit: At most one @remarks block is permitted per comment.
• Inheritance: Unlike most other tags, the contents of an @remarks block are copied when using the {@inheritDoc} tag.
• Theme Support: While the default TypeDoc theme simply displays @remarks content under a # Remarks header, other themes may use this tag to distinguish between summary-level content and detailed content intended for dedicated documentation pages.

/**
 * Some docs here
 *
 * @remarks
 * Much longer documentation here
 */
export function rand(): number;

TypeDoc runs on Node.js and is available as an NPM package. Install it as a development dependency using the following command:

npm install typedoc --save-dev

TypeDoc uses a minimal parser to extract TSDoc/JSDoc tags and supports Markdown within comments. It uses Shiki for syntax highlighting in fenced code blocks.

Key constraints:

• Only fenced code blocks are supported. Indentation-based code blocks will not prevent tags from being parsed.
• TypeDoc ignores any comments containing @license or @import tags.
• You can customize syntax highlighting themes using the --lightHighlightTheme and --darkHighlightTheme options.
• To use languages not loaded by default, use the highlightLanguages option.

/**
 * This comment _supports_ [Markdown](https://www.markdownguide.org/)
 */
export class DocumentMe {}

/**
 * Code blocks are great for examples
 *
 * ```ts
 * // run typedoc --help for a list of supported languages
 * const instance = new MyClass();
 * ```
 */
export class MyClass {}

If TypeDoc cannot automatically discover your entry points, you can manually specify a file (such as src/index.ts) to serve as the starting point for documentation.

npx typedoc src/index.ts