Documenting microservices

The traditional approach of API documentation is either to write service specification documents or to use static service registries. With a large number of microservices, it would be hard to keep the documentation of APIs in sync.

Microservices can be documented in many ways. This section will explore how microservices can be documented using the popular Swagger framework. In the following examples, we will use Springfox libraries for generating REST API documentation. Springfox is a set of Java Spring-friendly library.

Create a new Spring Starter project, and choose Web in the library selection window. Name the project as chapter3.swagger.

Note

The full source code of this example is available as the chapter3.swagger project in the code files of this book under the following Git repository:https://github.com/rajeshrv/Spring5Microservice

Since Springfox libraries are not part of the Spring suite, edit the pom.xml file, and add the springfox-swagger library dependencies...