Documentation Hall of Fame

Real examples of Open Source projects with excellent documentation.

This page is a collection of good examples of Open Source documentation projects. The projects and examples listed here are not endorsements. It is a collection of good examples to inspire your own Open Source documentation!

1. Aggregations 🔗

The projects listed below aggregate several existing documentation projects:

  • Awesome Documentation: Community-curated resource with examples of great documentation in Open Source projects.

  • Awesome Docs with Static Site Generators: This repo is suppose to give you a bunch of links to themes or ready implementations of documentation portals. They will help you to quickly get some good samples to play with a static site generator that you are interested with.

  • Awesome READMEs: A curated list of awesome READMEs. Find the source content on GitHub.

2. Developer documentation 🔗

These examples show projects that offer clear and concise documentation for developers:

  • Small project: TeleIRC

    • Small project with over 20 contributors and over five years of activity.

    • Developer docs are focused on explaining key topics that come up often with new contributors:

      • Coding conventions by project maintainers

      • Contributing guidelines

      • Architecture/state diagram

      • Code testing best practices

  • Medium to large projects:

    • MongoDB

    • Laravel

    • Google MediaPipe: MediaPipe offers cross-platform, customizable ML solutions for live and streaming media. MediaPipe documentation clearly explains what MediaPipe is, its strongest benefits as a tool for developers, and helpful information to start using it.

  • Large project: JupyterLab

    • JupyterLab is a large project with over 300 contributors and used by nearly 30,000 GitHub users.

    • Extensive and well-organized developer documentation on a range of topics. Not only coding.

3. Toolchain-specific examples 🔗

These examples are aggregated by specific toolchains commonly used for Open Source documentation.

3.1. Golang Hugo 🔗

These examples are good examples of documentation written using the Hugo documentation tool-chain.

  • UNICEF Open Source Inventory: This website you are reading right now? The content is written in a mix of AsciiDoc and Markdown, and published with Hugo.

3.2. Python Sphinx 🔗

These examples are good examples of documentation written using the Python Sphinx documentation tool-chain. Sphinx has integrations that simplify writing API documentation for Python projects, based on code comments in doc-strings.

  • sphinx-docs-opinionated-quickstart: Quick-start, opinionated template repository to add Sphinx-based documentation to an existing project. Includes ready-to-use Travis CI and ReadTheDocs.org configuration files, so you can start writing your docs, and spend less time figuring out tools.

  • parsy: Parsy is an easy way to combine simple, small parsers into complex, larger parsers. If it means anything to you, it’s a monadic parser combinator library for LL(infinity) grammars in the spirit of Parsec, Parsnip, and Parsimmon.

Updated on 19 Sep 2022