One hallmark of widely used REST APIs is that their contracts are thoroughly documented. Developers are more likely to adopt and use APIs whose behavior and syntax are described accurately in a structured, organized way. Keeping this documentation up to date as the contract evolves can be time-consuming and is a task that is easily overlooked. Fern Docs helps with this by reducing the toil involved in writing and maintaining API documentation. Fern automatically generates a website with attractive, usable documentation from a specification file that can be versioned alongside the API code. While our initial impressions of this product are positive, Fern does require you to maintain API information in a proprietary configuration file. While it provides a way to convert OpenAPI specs into its own configuration format, we'd prefer a tool that generates docs directly from annotated source code.
