documenting django models

I wrote this Django tool for generating documentation of Django models.

Here’s the repo: https://github.com/jakekara/django-model-docs

There are a lot of tools out there to generate documentation for Python code, particularly the API that code exposes. But a team I work on at The Washington Post needed a way to document the data model we were building using the Django ORM. We needed tables that described each field, so we could share it within and across teams to make sure that the model accurately represented the domain.

This project spins that code out into a standalone package that can be installed via pip and executed via a Django management command.

It will generate Markdown docs for any installed app’s models, and it uses docstrings and help_text to fill in the table, so it encourages self-documenting code best practices.

In addition to the management command, it exposes an extensible API, so you can change the way your app, models, or fields are documented.