Are overcomplicated documentation tools making you headbang a brick wall?

Wishing for something compatible with a Markdown-based site generator?

Longing for more than an XML comment scraper?

Docpal is a Markdown documentation generator for .NET assemblies without all the bloat. It's simple, straightforward, and easy to use.

Take your EXE or DLL and do this:

docpal Rant.dll -out ./docs

Boom, you have your docs. It's that easy!

• Requirements: Download NET Core SDK
• Install the tool:

dotnet tool install -g netcore-docpal

• To update if already installed:

dotnet tool update -g netcore-docpal

Don't waste your time learning some other tool that takes forever to set up. You can learn Docpal in a couple minutes and have results in seconds!

Docpal works with the very basics. You don't need config files with hundreds of settings.

You don't need an XML documentation file to use Docpal. If there is one, its contents will be automatically extracted into the docs. No extra setup required.

Unlike some other tools, Docpal only looks at user-facing types and members.

Many pages or one -- it's up to you! Tell Docpal to combine all your docs on one page with the --slim flag.

Docpal works wonderfully with other Markdown-based website generators, such as MkDocs.

Docpal can be run from a terminal or integrated into your build process to run automatically.

Here are the options it can currently use:

Usage: Docpal [OPTIONS]... <dll_pathfilename>

Options:
  -out <path>    Specifies the path where the docs will be saved.
  -xml <path>    Specifies a custom XML documentation path.
  --slim         Specifies that the docs will be combined into a single .md file.
  --noxml        Don't use XML.
  --mgtable      methods groups in type page will reported in a table with summary foreach method in the group
  --proptable    properties in type page will reported in a table with summary foreach

To produce documentation from a netcore library you may need to include referenced dlls while building it:

dotnet build /p:CopyLocalLockFileAssemblies=true

Docpal is written in C# 7 and requires Visual Studio 2017 or Visual Studio Code with dotnet core to compile.

cd Docpal
dotnet build -c Release
dotnet Docpal/bin/Release/netcoreapp2.2/Docpal.dll