Generate website API docs from code comments

[afoxman]

Use a tool to extract APIs and types from @rnx-kit packages. Embed them into the API docs on the website.

Example packages which can help with this:

• https://github.com/atomicpages/docusaurus-plugin-react-docgen-typescript
• https://api-extractor.com/

[kelset]

yes pls! 👏

For context, there were some attempts also on the rn repo a long time ago: facebook/react-native@eb7dbc8 but as far as I know it's not actually used. I can reach out to a couple folks to verify the state of that script logic

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UPDATE: it looks like the logic above was never used, but there was also this other attempt: https://github.com/facebook/react-native-website/tree/main/sync-api-docs but this one too has never been used

[kelset]

on the Expo side of things, they use a solution based on https://typedoc.org/ to export JSON

You can find the logic here: https://github.com/expo/expo/blob/main/docs/components/plugins/APISection.tsx + https://github.com/expo/expo/tree/main/docs/components/plugins/api

[tido64]

Just an FYI, we are currently using TSDoc to generate the API tables for the tools-*'s README files:

rnx-kit/scripts/src/commands/updateApiReadme.js

Line 8 in 99854bb

const { DocExcerpt, TSDocParser } = require("@microsoft/tsdoc");

It has its own quirks. For instance, you have to manually concatenate the lines, parse parameters AST-style, and other things. It's doable, but not very friendly/maintainable. Would be interested to learn whether TypeDoc is better in this regard.