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What hosting services exist that allows free API documentation hosting? Think Travis for CI or Bintray for binaries, only for docs.

I am looking for a service that can help automate API documentation publishing -- we would like to publish docs as part of our continuous integration.

Ideally it should have all of the following, but a subset of these features is ok too:

  • should be free

  • has a reasonable amount of space for hosting the docs

  • integration with GitHub/Bitbucket is a plus - like Travis works for projects builds, but hosting the generated docs

  • has a Web API for uploading the docs, in which case we would use Travis or Jenkins to upload the docs upon a successful build

  • the API documentation we want to publish is for an open-source project

  • the type of documentation would be ScalaDoc for Scala, or JavaDoc for Java, but ideally it should allow uploading any kind of (HTML) docs

  • ideally, there should be no ads, or they should not be too intrusive

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  • Is this for a specific language? Usually free services have some caveat or agenda, but there may be some, like Github, where the agenda is simple free services for open-sourced projects. So could you clarify whether your API is for an open-source or commercial project? – Neil Slater Apr 24 '14 at 10:56
  • The API should be for an open source project, clarifying. – axel22 Apr 24 '14 at 11:21
  • Is advertisement OK? – Nicolas Raoul♦ Apr 25 '14 at 2:22
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How about Github Pages.

  • should be free: Yes.
  • has a reasonable amount of space for hosting the docs: effectively unlimited for docs; soft limit of 1GB per repo/100mb per file.
  • integration with GitHub/Bitbucket is a plus - like Travis works for projects builds, but hosting the generated docs: integrated with Github.
  • has a Web API for uploading the docs, in which case we would use Travis or Jenkins to upload the docs upon a successful build You can upload it through git commands - I don't know if you can use Jenkins or Travis to do so.
  • the type of documentation would be ScalaDoc for Scala, or JavaDoc for Java, but ideally it should allow uploading any kind of (HTML) docs: I've only used Markdown (md) files, but this SO question describes using Maven to upload JavaDocs.
  • ideally, there should be no ads, or they should not be too intrusive: ad-free

An example would be Wrye Bash's Help pages - the help pages source is hosted in a separate repo.

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  • That's not a bad idea. Granted, we should rebase the history each time to prevent the repository from growing too much. This should be no problem with either Jenkins or Travis - either a bash script or a build tool task can do it. – axel22 Apr 26 '14 at 8:56
  • I'm accepting this answer. It seems to work well - I have a script that checks out the github documentation repo into a temporarity directory, copies the documentation there, rebases and force pushes back to the gh-pages branch. If anybody else is doing this, make sure you create a temporary dir (mktemp command) and do the rebasing/force-pushing there, otherwise you might ruin the repo with the code. – axel22 Apr 30 '14 at 8:39
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Two great services:

Read the Docs is very popular for open source projects, and especially for Python projects, as it is based on Sphinx.

Viewdocs.io has less features and is less popular, but is arguably simpler, as there are no accounts to set up, and does not support reStructuredText.

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Just to add another awesome service docsapp.io

DocsApp provide easy to use markdown editor, so non-technical users able to use it as well. Furthermore, it is free for open source project.

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