Getting Started with YARD

There are a few ways which YARD can be of use to you or your project. This document will cover the most common ways to use YARD:

Documenting Code with YARD

By default, YARD is compatible with the same RDoc syntax most Ruby developers are already familiar with. However, one of the biggest advantages of YARD is the extended meta-data syntax, commonly known as "tags", that you can use to express small bits of information in a structured and formal manner. While RDoc syntax expects you to describe your method in a completely free-form manner, YARD recommends declaring your parameters, return types, etc. with the @tag syntax, which makes outputting the documentation more consistent and easier to read. Consider the RDoc documentation for a method reverse:

# Converts the object into textual markup given a specific `format` 
# (defaults to `:html`)
#
# == Parameters:
# format::
#   A Symbol declaring the format to convert the object to. This 
#   can be `:text` or `:html`.
#
# == Returns:
# A string representing the object in a specified
# format.
#
def to_format(format = :html)
  # format the object
end

While this may seem easy enough to read and understand, it's hard for a machine to properly pull this data back out of our documentation. Also we've tied our markup to our content, and now our documentation becomes hard to maintain if we decide later to change our markup style (maybe we don't want the ":" suffix on our headers anymore).

In YARD, we would simply define our method as:

# Converts the object into textual markup given a specific format.
#
# @param [Symbol] format the format type, `:text` or `:html`
# @return [String] the object converted into the expected format.
def to_format(format = :html)
  # format the object
end

Using tags we can add semantic metadata to our code without worrying about presentation. YARD will handle presentation for us when we decide to generate documentation later.

Adding Tags to Documentation

The tag syntax that YARD uses is the same @tag-style syntax you may have seen if you've ever coded in Java, Python, PHP, Objective-C or a myriad of other languages. The following tag adds an author tag to your class:

# @author Loren Segal
class MyClass
end

To allow for large amounts of text, the @tag syntax will recognize any indented lines following a tag as part of the tag data. For example:

# @deprecated Use {#my_new_method} instead of this method because
#   it uses a library that is no longer supported in Ruby 1.9.
#   The new method accepts the same parameters.
def mymethod
end

Declaring Types

Some tags also have an optional "types" field which let us declare a list of types associated with the tag. For instance, a return tag can be declared with or without a types field.

# @return [String, nil] the contents of our object or nil
#   if the object has not been filled with data.
def validate; end

# We don't care about the "type" here:
# @return the object
def to_obj; end

The list of types is in the form [type1, type2, ...] and is mostly free-form, so we can also specify duck-types or constant values. For example:

# @param [#to_s] argname any object that responds to `#to_s`
# @param [true, false] argname only true or false

Note the the latter example can be replaced by the meta-type "Boolean", and numeric types can be replaced by "Number". These meta-types are by convention only, but are recommended.

List types can be specified in the form CollectionClass<ElementType, ...>. For instance, consider the following Array that holds a set of Strings and Symbols:

# @param [Array<String, Symbol>] list the list of strings and symbols.

List of Tags

A list of tags can be found in Tags

Other Extended Syntax

Reference Tags

To minimize rewriting of documentation and to ease maintenance, a special tag syntax is allowed to reference tags from other objects. Doing this allows a tag to be added as meta-data for multiple objects. A full example of this syntax is found in the Tags file.

Inter-Document Links

YARD supports a special syntax to link to other code objects or files. The syntax is {ObjectName#method OPTIONAL_TITLE}. This syntax is acceptable anywhere in documentation with the exception of the @see tag, which automatically links its data.

Using YARD to Generate Documentation

Obviously since YARD is a documentation tool, one of its primary goals is to generate documentation for a variety of formats, most commonly HTML. The yardoc tool that is installed with YARD allows you to quickly export code documentation to HTML document files. In addition to this, YARD ships with two more tools allowing you to quickly view ri-style documentation for a specific class or method as well as an extra tool to generate UML diagrams for your code using Graphviz. An overview of these tools can be found in the README under the Usage section.

Extending YARD

There are many ways to extend YARD to support non-standard Ruby syntax (DSLs), add new meta-data tags or programmatically access the intermediate metadata and documentation from code. An overview of YARD's full architecture can be found in the Overview document.

For information on adding support for Ruby DSLs, see the Handlers and Parser architecture documents.

For information on adding extra tags, see Tags.

For information on accessing the data YARD stores about your documentation, look at the CodeObjects architecture document.

Templating YARD

In many cases you may want to change the style of YARD's templates or add extra information after extending it. The Templates architecture document covers the basics of how YARD's templating system works.

Plugin Support

As of 0.4, YARD will automatically load any gem named with the prefix of yard- or yard_. You can use this to load a custom plugin that extend YARD's functionality. A good example of this is the yard-rspec plugin, which adds RSpec specifications to your documentation (yardoc and yri). You can try it out by installing the gem or cloning the project and trying the example:

$ gem install yard-rspec -s http://gemcutter.org
or
$ git clone git://github.com/lsegal/yard-spec-plugin

YARD also provides a way to temporarily disable plugins on a per-user basis. To disable a plugin create the file ~/.yard/ignored_plugins with a list of plugin names separated by newlines. Note that the .yard directory might not exist, so you may need to create it.