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Furkan Bayram
Furkan Bayram

Posted on • Edited on

Coolest Tool for Writing Documentation - VuePress

⭐ Introduction ⭐

Last week was my first week in my new job and don't have much idea about our projects. We have decided as a team to write documantation. My team lead asked me to create a documentation project for all of our projects. So i did some research and saw a cool star. Then i noticed it was VUEPREEESSS

It's really simple and useable.

What is VuePress ❓

VuePress is composed of two parts: a minimalistic static site generator with a Vue-powered theming system and Plugin API, and a default theme optimized for writing technical documentation. It was created to support the documentation needs of Vue’s own sub projects.

You encounter this part when you open the site of VuePress. I used VuePress to create a documentation project.

How to Create a VuePress Project? ✏️

I used npm to install vuepress.

# install vuepress
npm install -g vuepress # OR yarn global add vuepress

# create the project folder
mkdir vuepress-project

# create a markdown file for homepage
echo '# Hello VuePress' > README.md

# run project
vuepress dev

# for build
#vuepress build
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After this, you will see just an empty page and Hello VuePress text. You will need a config file to customize to your project.

Customize the project 💭

It is suggested that we create a directory named .vuepress in the Vuepress documentation. Everything about of VuePress will be here.

Config File 🌟

You should create a config file to customize the project and should export configs. It is config.js and must be in .vuepress file.

module.exports = {
    title: 'Project Title',
    description: 'Project Description',
    themeConfig: {
        nav: [
            { text: 'Home', link: '/' },
            { text: 'Guide', link: '/guide/introduction' },
        ],

        sidebar: [
           {
               title: 'Home',
               path: '/home/',
           },
           {
               title: 'Submenu',
               path: '/submenu/',
           }
        ],
    }
}
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I wrote my project name and description. In addition I created a navbar and sidebar for navigation.

Basic Project

Customize the Homepage 🏠

To customize the homepage, you can edit the readme.md file of the homepage (./README.md) as follows.

---
home: true
heroImage: /img/logo.jpg
heroText: Welcome
actionText: Get Started
actionLink: /home/
features:
- title: "Simplicity First"
  details: Minimal setup with markdown-centered project structure helps you focus on writing.
- title: "Vue-Powered"
  details: Enjoy the dev experience of Vue + webpack, use Vue components in markdown, and develop custom themes with Vue.
- title: "Performant"
  details: VuePress generates pre-rendered static HTML for each page, and runs as an SPA once a page is loaded.
footer: Copyright © 2020
--- 
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And your homepage will looks like this.
Homepage

Your project looks like this and the document structure is as follows:

.
├─ .vuepress
│ └─ config.js
├─ home
│ └─ README.md
├─ submenu
│ └─ README.md
├─ README.md
└─ package.json
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What's the next? ❕

IT'S TIME TO WRITE DOCUMANTATION FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS!!! 💪

As you can see it's much easy. You can use an editor to write .markdown and so can write documentation fastly.

Thank you for read. If you enjoy this article please like and share! See you!

Top comments (1)

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prashantnirgun profile image
Prashant Nirgun

Thanks for your contribution. Is there any way to create a sub menu inside menu ie navbar. My menu list is getting lengthy I need to sub categorised it