Top 10 Free Templates for API Documentation

Do you need to create API docs for your RESTful API? Want to automatically generate API documentation? Today, I am going to share some free templates that are designed to showcase your API. Good documentation is really important so start with a good foundation. These API resources are simple, clean, leverage best practices, and will make your API users happy.

1. Slate – helps you create beautiful API documentation. It’s responsive, uses Markdown and Ruby, and it’s inspired by Stripe’s and Paypal’s API docs. Here is a demo.

2. apiDoc – inline documentation for RESTful web APIs that is created from API annotations in your source code. The theme is 2 columns and here is a demo.

3. FlatDoc – makes writing documentation easy. There is no built process, just a small JavaScript file that fetches Markdown files and renders them as full pages. You create documentation from Readme files. The default theme is responsive and you can deploy via Github Pages.

4. Webservice API Specification Doc Template – easy, simple, clean API doc template built as a Google Doc page.

5. API Blueprint – gives you awesome tools for your whole API lifecycle. You can generate documentation automatically and much more with this tool. Here are some examples. Also, check out aglio, the API blueprint renderer.

6. Swagger – simple and powerful interface to your API. Lots of automation, API tooling, and even client SDK generation and discoverability. Check out the live demo.

7. Calamum – generates REST API documentation from a JSON file. It has a twitter template and a bootstrap template.

8. miredot is a REST API documentation generator for Java. Check out the example.

9. RAML – simple and succinct way of describing RESTful APIs. It’s built on broadly-used standards such as YAML and JSON and it has many tools, one of which is RAML to HTML which output documentation based on RAML files.

10. RestDoc – PHP scripts to generate REST documentation from YAML files.

External

Beautiful Docs
Read the Docs
readme.io
APIary
Doxygen
Dexy
iodocs
Docco