Installation

Requirements

TypeDoc requires Node.js to be installed on your system. If you haven't done that already, head over to their site and follow their install instructions.

Installing TypeDoc is available as a node package. Using npm ensures that all relevant dependencies are setup correctly. You can choose to either install locally to your project or globally to the CLI.

TypeDoc aims to support the two latest TypeScript releases for the latest release. Depending on the scale of breaking changes introduced in a new TypeScript version, a given version may support more versions of TypeScript.

Installation

If you want to use TypeDoc from your command line in a project, use the API in your project code, or TypeDoc in an npm script, a local installation is the recommended approach. First install TypeDoc in your project:

$ npm install typedoc --save-dev

By saving TypeDoc to the project package.json file with the previous command, anyone who runs npm install on the project will have typedoc installed at the specific version required for the project.

The name of TypeDoc's executable is typedoc. To verify that it works, you can now invoke the CLI in your project using npx (npx is a tool bundled with npm), passing TypeDoc the --version argument:

$ npx typedoc --version

TypeDoc 0.23.0
Using TypeScript 4.7.2 from /home/gerrit/typedoc/node_modules/typescript/lib

Command line interface

The CLI can be used both from your terminal or from npm scripts. All arguments that are not passed with flags are parsed as entry points. Use either the --out or --json arguments to define the format and destination of your documentation.

typedoc --out docs src/index.ts

JSON Configuration

Instead of passing all arguments via the command line, the CLI also supports reading TypeDoc configuration from json files.

typedoc.json

When running typedoc from the CLI, you can define options in a json file named typedoc.json.

{
    // Comments are supported, like tsconfig.json
    "entryPoints": ["src/index.ts"],
    "out": "docs"
}

tsconfig.json

TypeDoc options can be defined within an existing tsconfig.json file. Use a typedocOptions section to define options as a json model.

{
    "compilerOptions": {
        "normalTypeScriptOptions": "here"
    },
    "typedocOptions": {
        "entryPoints": ["src/index.ts"],
        "out": "docs"
    }
}

Node module

If you would like dynamic configuration or would like to run typedoc without using the CLI, import the node module and build the documentation yourself.

const TypeDoc = require("typedoc");

async function main() {
    // Application.bootstrap also exists, which will not load plugins
    // Also accepts an array of option readers if you want to disable
    // TypeDoc's tsconfig.json/package.json/typedoc.json option readers
    const app = await TypeDoc.Application.bootstrapWithPlugins({
        entryPoints: ["src/index.ts"],
    });

    const project = await app.convert();

    if (project) {
        // Project may not have converted correctly
        const outputDir = "docs";

        // Rendered docs
        await app.generateDocs(project, outputDir);
        // Alternatively generate JSON output
        await app.generateJson(project, outputDir + "/documentation.json");
    }
}

main().catch(console.error);