Best Practices for Creating All-Inclusive API Documentation

API documentation in its best form plays an important role in supporting developers to understand and use APIs appropriately. The aim of this blog is to document a set of guidelines (as per our developers) for effective, efficient, and easy-to-maintain API documentation that can be followed across teams.

Why API Documentation Matters

• Optimized Developer Experience: Developers can easily understand what endpoints and use cases are available, which makes it easier to use and incorporate the API.

• Speeds Up Onboarding: Thorough documentation helps decrease the time required to familiarize oneself with the process and better adapt when working with internal teams and outside partners.

• Simplified Maintenance: Detailed APIs are easier to modify and maintain, in a way keeping the product sustainable for the targeted use.

• Facilitated Bug Detection: Documenting includes testing all the features of the product, which is an effective way of identifying and solving issues.

Setting Standards for Consistency

Establishing standards within your team ensures your API documentation is consistent and easy to read. Consider these areas:

• Syntax: Establish guidelines for capitalization, punctuation, and spacing. For instance, use the capital letter at the beginning of the title, use period at the end of the sentence and separate words by a single space, except the variable names.  

• Language: If the team members speak the same native language, the documentation should also be in that language. However, international teams should use the language understood by all the members.

• Format: Define what programming languages and formats should be used to illustrate examples and describe the concepts.

• Tools: Decide which tools and platforms can be adopted for documentation creation and maintenance.

Tools for API Documentation

We currently employ two tools to create and maintain API documentation: each tool comes with different rules that must be followed and they each have their strengths. We would like to give you an insight of what you can do with these:  

Postman

Postman is a very multipurpose tool, which is used mostly for API testing and development. It offers many features that make it a valuable tool for developers:

• Team Collaboration: Multiple team members can work on the API at the same time. It is useful when working with a big number of people or on a huge project that involves alternating programmers.

• Internal and External Collections: It’s possible to divide internal and external documentation into two different collections. This makes sure that unauthorized people cannot access certain information, while making specified information available for users who need it.  

• Comprehensive Descriptions: Includes the ability of developers to write clear descriptions of the endpoints, setting of the request and offering examples of the responses. This makes the documentation more informative and helps the users to know how they are expected to deal with API.  

• Interoperability with OpenAPI: It is possible to upload OpenAPI documents to Postman, which means that you can enjoy all the advantages of the OpenAPI structure and utilize Postman’s collaboration tools. However, the other way round is not possible, which hinders flexibility of the process.

OpenAPI

OpenAPI is an effective tool that offers a formal and methodical approach to API documentation. Here are some things to consider:

• Structured Documentation: OpenAPI provides a structure with sub-sections for specifying the parent class, title, description, version, servers, and paths of the API. This is particularly helpful to make sure that all the important details are covered and presented in the most appropriate order.

• Automatic Generation: One of the significant benefits of using OpenAPI is that working with it, a developer can automatically generate documentation.

• YAML Format: OpenAPI uses YAML, a data serialization language that is easy to read and write, ideal for configuration files.

We've created our web framework for TypeScript, Yedra, with the help of OpenAPI. Check out our blog to see what Yedra all is about!

Conclusion

API documentation is the process of setting standards, using appropriate tools and having a documented set that is clear and easy to comprehend. Adopting these best practices will help improve the quality of APIs and make them easier for the developers to use, take less time to onboard them, easier to maintain and identify issues when designing, creating and maintaining them.