Generate YARD Docs for Your Gem

A little tidbit that most people don’t know about is that since 0.2.3.5, YARD can actually be used in place of RDoc to generate documentation when a gem is installed. All you need to do is add the following to your .gemspec:

SPEC = Gem::Specification.new do |s|
  ...
  s.has_rdoc = 'yard'
end

If you use BlueCloth or another lib to do your markdown processing, you'll need to add that as a dependency to your gem.

And with that, YARD will generate docs when your gem is installed if YARD is on the user’s system. This works with RubyGems 1.3.1+. Best part of all, it integrates perfectly seamlessly with your RubyGems doc server. gem server will show YARD docs for the rdoc link of your project.