🚀 We built doc-it-up: The API that documents itself so you don't have to.

Hey Peerlist community!

As developers, we love building. But if there's one thing that kills our productivity, it's writing and maintaining API documentation.

We've all been there:

• 📝 Writing docs takes 5x longer than building the actual endpoint.

• 🔄 Docs get outdated the second we deploy a change.

• 😤 Teammates get frustrated with undocumented or incorrect endpoints.

We got so tired of this cycle that we decided to fix it. That's why we built doc-it-up.

It's a simple idea with a powerful impact: Your API should document itself.

❌ The Old Way (Painful Annotations)

JavaScript

/** @swagger /users: post: summary: Create a new user ... (40 more lines of YAML-in-a-comment) / app.post('/users', (req, res) => { // Your logic here });

✅ The doc-it-up Way

JavaScript

app.post('/users', (req, res) => { // Your logic here // Documentation is generated automatically! });

How?

doc-it-up is a smart middleware for Express.js. You add it to your app, and it passively learns your API's structure by watching real requests and responses during development. It then generates a complete OpenAPI 3.0 spec and a beautiful Swagger UI on the fly.

Installation is literally one line:

JavaScript

import { autoDocMiddleware, docsHandler } from 'doc-it-up'; const app = express(); // That's it. This is the magic. app.use(autoDocMiddleware()); // Your routes... // Your docs live here. app.use('/docs', docsHandler());

[Image/GIF Suggestion: A quick GIF showing: 1. Code with the middleware. 2. A Postman request being sent. 3. The generated docs page instantly showing the new endpoint.]

✨ What makes it special?

🧠 Learns As You Build: No config files, no code comments. It just works by observing your API. If you add a field to a response, the docs update on the next request. No restart needed.

🎨 Beautiful, Interactive UI: Automatically generates a stunning and mobile-friendly Swagger UI where your team can test endpoints directly.

🔐 Handles the Hard Stuff: Out-of-the-box support for file uploads (multipart/form-data), Bearer tokens, API keys, and more. It documents the complex parts of your API that are often forgotten.

⚡ Feather-light: Adds less than 0.1ms of latency, so it never gets in your way.

We built this tool to save ourselves from the headache of documentation, and we hope it can help you too. It’s open-source and built with ❤️ by developers, for developers.

🚀 Try it out & Let us know what you think!

We're just getting started and would love to hear your feedback.

• NPM: npm install doc-it-up

• GitHub Repo:https://github.com/Kishan-Agarwal-28/doc-it-up

Check out the repo, and if you like the idea, a ⭐ would mean the world to us!

What do you all use for API documentation right now? What are your biggest pain points? Let's discuss in the comments!

#javascript #nodejs #api #opensource #devtools #expressjs #documentation #backend