Ask HN: Developer Portal Recommendations

Posted by wuliwong on Wednesday June 16, 2021 @01:30PM
from the ask-hn dept.

My team is going to start development on a new API for our company soon and we want to have a developer portal. We want it to be a place for devs to find documentation, discover other APIs we have, and get access (auth tokens/api keys). Have you had any experience with any "out of the box" solutions? We are on google cloud, so most likely we wouldn't want to use AWS tools but we are also open to any 3rd party options. At my last company we rolled our own developer portal, so I know some of the pitfalls of that approach. I've never used a 3rd party solution, so I'm interested in what is available and pros/cons.

Thanks!

( 4 comments | 3 points | on HN )

Re:Ask HN: Developer Portal Recommendations by the_laka on Wednesday June 16, 2021 @02:06PM (#27531585)

I've used readme.com with mixed results. TBH, wouldn't recommend. It's easy to setup but the cost of maintaining and updating it becomes more and more with every new endpoint. And if you've got a lot of them, it also tends to slow down.

docusaurus.io is the next tool on my list to try out, it looks promising. I think it's better suited for smaller projects, with a lot of things out of the box. I haven't seen an API company using it yet though.

Station is something I've used in the past, because I was working for Nexmo at the time. The team at Nexmo / Vonage won a few awards because of it for the best Developer Portal a few years back. It's open source now, and the cost to setup might be higher than the other two, but a lot of the design decisions make sense for an API portal. It's also super fast once deployed, and that helps a lot with developer perception. https://github.com/Nexmo/station

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Re:Ask HN: Developer Portal Recommendations by austincheney on Wednesday June 16, 2021 @01:48PM (#27531365)

I like Swagger but there are several boxed solutions for this. My recommendation is to examine this from a documentation first perspective. That means the end product displays documentation not that your developers running first time configuration have something to read.

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Re:Ask HN: Developer Portal Recommendations by wuliwong on Thursday June 17, 2021 @12:47PM (#27541641)

Yea, i'd hope to use a solution that leveraged the openapi spec.

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Re:Ask HN: Developer Portal Recommendations by dragosbulugean on Wednesday June 16, 2021 @02:31PM (#27531856)

hi, www.archbee.io is a hosted docs solution for your usecase.

disclaimer: I'm the founder, happy to show you around :)

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