Quickstart

Install via RubyGems:

Try it out (showing output for Ruby's OptionParser):

Inch is a command-line tool that gives you hints where to improve your docs.
One Inch at a time.

Philosophy

Inch was created to help people document their code, therefore it may be more important to look at what it does not do than at what it does.

It does not aim for "fully documented" or "100% documentation coverage".
It does not tell you to document all your code (neither does it tell you not to).
It does not impose rules on how your documentation should look like.
It does not require that, e.g."every method's documentation should be a single line under 80 characters not ending in a period" or that "every class and module should provide a code example of their usage".

Inch takes a more relaxed approach towards documentation measurement and tries to show you places where your codebase could use more documentation.

The Grade System

Inch assigns grades to each class, module, constant or method in a codebase, based on how complete the docs are.

The grades are:

A - Seems really good
B - Properly documented, but could be improved
C - Needs work
U - Undocumented

Using this system has some advantages compared to plain coverage scores:

You can get an A even if you "only" get 90 out of 100 possible points.
Getting a B is basically good enough.
Undocumented objects are assigned a special grade, instead of scoring 0%.

The last point might be the most important one: If objects are undocumented, there is nothing to evaluate. Therefore you can not simply give them a bad rating, because they might be left undocumented intentionally.

Inch does not give you a grade for your whole codebase.

"Why?" you might ask. Look at the example above.

You can see a grade distribution that tells you three things:

There is a significant amount of documented code.
The present documentation seems really good.
There are still many undocumented methods.

This provides a lot more insight than an overall grade could, because an overall grade for the above example would either be an A (if the evaluation ignores undocumented objects) or a weak C (if the evaluation includes them).

The grade distribution does a much better job of painting the bigger picture.

Priorities ↑ ↓

Every class, module, constant and method in a codebase is assigned a priority which reflects how important Inch thinks it is to be documented.

This process follows some reasonable rules, like

it is more important to document public methods than private ones
it is more important to document methods with many parameters than methods without parameters
it is not important to document objects marked as :nodoc:

Priorities are displayed as arrows. Arrows pointing north mark high priority objects, arrows pointing south mark low priority objects.

Format requirements

Inch can handle all forms of inline docs, but was built with an emphasis on YARD, RDoc and TomDoc.

These inline-docs below all score an A despite being written in different styles:

# Detects the size of the blob.
#
# @example
#   blob_size(filename, blob) # => some value
#
# @param filename [String] the filename
# @param blob [String] the blob data
# @param mode [String, nil] optional String mode
# @return [Fixnum,nil]
def blob_size(filename, blob, mode = nil)

# Detects the size of the blob.
#
#   blob_size(filename, blob) # => some value
#
# Params:
# +filename+:: String filename
# +blob+:: String blob data
# +mode+:: Optional String mode (defaults to nil)
def blob_size(filename, blob, mode = nil)

# Public: Detects the size of the blob.
#
# filename - String filename
# blob - String blob data
# mode - Optional String mode (defaults to nil)
#
# Examples
#
#   blob_size(filename, blob)
#   # => some value
#
# Returns Fixnum or nil.
def blob_size(filename, blob, mode = nil)

But you don't have to adhere to any specific syntax. This gets an A as well:

# Returns the size of a +blob+ for a given +filename+.
#
#   blob_size(filename, blob)
#   # => some value
#
def blob_size(filename, blob, mode = nil)

Inch lets you write your documentation the way you want.

Get it!

Inch is available via RubyGems. The source code is published on GitHub.

You can find more information on subcommands, limitations, and a comparison with other tools in the README on GitHub.