Create Rust Docs

Documentation in Rust: Can be helpful, but ... crate docs can also be quite incomplete.

Another way to familiarize yourself with a library is to look at the documentation. With Rust, we can instantly create documentation based on the comments in the source code.

👉   The rustdoc book

There is the rustdoc command, but alternatively you can use cargo doc which uses rustdoc behind the scenes.

👉   The cargo book - cargo doc

Hints

By default, the rustdoc engine evaluates only the enabled features. To create the documentation that covers the whole code, use the option --all-features.

To include non-public items, use the --document-private-items flag.

All options are displayed by executing cargo doc --help.

So my favorite command is:

cargo doc --all-features --document-private-items --target-dir "rustdocs" --open

When you run the command, rustdoc will scan all files and create a working folder debug/ and an output folder doc/ inside the target directory. Depending on the number of scanned crates this might take a while.

Rust Docs for IOTA SDK

Download the library from Github:

👉   IOTA SDK Library

Open VS Code and run the commands:

cd sdk
cargo doc --all-features --document-private-items --target-dir "rustdocs" --open

It will run several minutes and create the output folder "rustdocs":

Eventually, the browser will open automatically and present the root page of the documentation.

Tip: Delete the target/ folder afterwards - it occupies 4.4 GB of space.

Rust Docs for iota-client (deprecated)

Prior to executing the cargo doc ... command mentioned above, switch to the client/ directory located at the root, rather than the sdk/ directory.

Sometimes you are facing unresolved links

When executing the command, I encountered a handful of error messages due to unresolved links. In rustdoc, links are indicated by square brackets [...]. Fortunately, fixing these issues is a breeze: simply remove the square brackets i.e. the link, and the problematic areas will be swiftly resolved.