Ask HN: What open source projects have great documentation? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What open source projects have great documentation?

11 pointsMrPowers16 comments

There was a great thread a couple of weeks ago on with tips on writing documentation that devs love: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31945863

A lot of commenters on that thread mentioned DigitalOcean as an example of great docs for a product.

Does anyone have examples of great docs / user guides for open source projects? I'd like to study well done open source docs and learn more about what can be added to the docs to make them more useful for devs.

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ZMQ: it's almost worth using the library for the documentation alone, fabulous.

https://zeromq.org/get-started/

Gentoo and FreeBSD.

https://www.gentoo.org/get-started/

https://www.freebsd.org/docs/

VueJS - Evan You wrote VueJS and the docs with the idea that you could pick it up and be coding an app over a weekend.

Laravel - Build an end to end complete full stack application. You can incorporate just about every boilerplate feature you can think of by just following the docs.

Gitlab - Open and complete docs on source management, and the Gitlab product. But also very easy to understand docs on different aspects of running a software business, including style guides, and messages from executives.

Svelte’s tutorial, docs and REPL are among the best both at introducing the technology and giving depth. The REPL is used in through out to teach the basics and allow the community to link to working solutions when answering questions in forums across the internet.

https://svelte.dev/tutorial/basics

In my opinion, SQLite has good documentation, and so does the Fossil version control system.

(Unfortunately, a lot of modern software lacks documentation, making it difficult to use. Do not assume that the user interface is understandable. If you do not include comprehensive documentation, then it will not be understandable.)

Emacs documentation is a first class citizen. You can hit C-h-f to look up any function, or, C-h-k to see what a key is bound to (and then follow links to functions).

I recently submitted a package to MELPA (an emacs package repo) and part of the process was cleaning up the doc strings in the code to ensure that they fit the standard.

Python, Postgres, SQLite

I personally like the Polars docs because they have a detailed user guide that makes it so easy to get started with the project: https://pola-rs.github.io/polars-book/user-guide/

https://docs.streamlit.io

https://spacy.io/

CERNs openstack documentation.

https://clouddocs.web.cern.ch/

https://bearssl.org/

Spacy had actual runnable code examples throughout, directly in the browser

No mentions to django?

OpenBSD. The documentation is second to none.

NOT great documentation - Lazarus/Free Pascal

It's all docstrings type stuff, and very incomplete

Python.

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