RESTful API Documentation with Go and chi docgen Package
An important chore that gets neglected by developers is writing documentation for their RESTful APIs. Often, this task ends up being assigned lower priority than other tasks, such as building a new feature or modifying an existing feature. Although it delivers no immediate tangible value to end users like features, documentation produces intangible value for developers and their companies. By having detailed information about a RESTful API's endpoints, developers can quickly know how to obtain authorization for protected endpoints, access and interact with certain resources, format the data that's required in a request's body, etc. Ultimately, the value in documentation comes from increased developer productivity and saved development time. The more developers the documentation serves, the more value the documentation produces. Fortunately, you don't have to spend any time or effort to manually build and maintain documentation from scratch. There are open source tools like Swagger that automate the process of designing and generating RESTful API documentation for developers. These tools: Best of all, most of these tools only need, as input, the source code of the RESTful API or a JSON representation of the RESTful API that's compliant with the OpenAPI Specification . Or, these tools can get fed other representations of the RESTful API that are based on alternative API specifications like RAML ( R ESTful A PI M odeling L anguage).
