Documentation is a product

Developers integrate with your API using the documentation. Poor docs slow adoption, generate support requests, and cause incorrect integrations. Treat documentation with the same care as the API itself.

What good API docs contain

  • Quick start — get to a working API call in under 5 minutes.
  • Authentication guide — exactly how to authenticate, with copy-paste examples.
  • Endpoint reference — every endpoint, every parameter, every response field, with types and constraints. Auto-generated from OpenAPI.
  • Code examples — in at least 3 languages (curl, Python, JavaScript).
  • Error reference — every error code, what it means, how to handle it.
  • Changelog — what changed between versions.

Tooling

  • Redoc — beautiful OpenAPI docs, single HTML file, easy to self-host.
  • Swagger UI — interactive "try it out" feature, standard OpenAPI renderer.
  • Mintlify, Readme.io — managed developer portals with analytics.

Keeping docs accurate

Generate reference docs from the OpenAPI spec automatically. Make docs updates part of the PR that changes the API. A doc that is wrong is worse than no doc.