What should API documentation look like?

How do I write an API document?

You'll find the documentation for the core library API is on this Github repo.

When you're ready to test your API, you can use curl with your REST API URL to test your API by connecting to the API with your API key. If you try to POST data with more than one part or send a file, then your API will not be fully tested. To test your full API, you need to use JSON Data. As you get comfortable with the API and its response you may wish to add tests, but they're not strictly required.

My document is an object. If you have documents, then you need to have a root object that defines everything about your document so that it doesn't become too big or complex. It usually consists of a 'description' which describes what the document is used for. For example, you can ask your API how much does the package cost, and it might return details of where in UK it is sold, and if the package is free or has a specific set of features. You can also ask for information about the items in the package, for example you could make an online shopping request that is able to provide you a list of all of the packages in a store. You can then make a request for one of those packages and this is what you should look like in your API response, which is in JSON format.

What is the standard for API documentation?

Should there be a README.

Md file next to the repo as well?

We normally only create API docs when we use documentation that is provided with the project. Most of the public APIs are provided by 3rd party projects on Github for example, or if they do not include public/private documentation, its at best only available on their website We have a custom documentation generator built into the IDE (Visual Studio 2024 uses DocIO), it's an Electron Application running on port 8200. We also created some utilities that handle this file. One helper script called documentation-to-html which processes docs to produce pretty HTML files, using docio to parse each file. One of the benefits of having it in a separate application is you can also write tests for them. The other helper is gitignored and called from our post-commit hooks, which run every time a new commit is pushed, it writes documentation-to-markdown format so the docs in source control (Git) and in our Github repo gets generated at the same time.

Another way is to use an online API Documentation provider like docs.w3.org to get documentation.