Doxygen Example

Doxygen is a documentation system for use with many languages, including C++, C, Java, and Python.

First, install Doxygen. Using Ubuntu, I installed the package with:

$ apt-get install doxygen

Next. enter the source directory of a project you're working on and run:

$ doxygen -g

That will create a config file named Doxyfile in the current directory. You can customize it, but we'll accept the defaults for now.

Now begin writing your documentation. Here's an example of documenting a simple C++ program:

#include <iostream>

using namespace std;

/**
 * @brief Example class to demonstrate basic Doxygen usage
 * @author MLA
 *
 * This is a simple class to demonstrate how Doxygen is used.
 * It implements the Euclidean algorithm to compute the greatest
 * common divisor of two numbers.
 */

class Euclid {
  public:
    
    /**
     * Compute the greatest common divisor of two integers.
     *
     * @param a first integer
     * @param b second integer
     * @return greatest common divisor of a and b
     */
    static const int gcd(const int a, const int b) {
      if (0 == b) return a;
      return gcd(b, a % b);
    }
};

Finally, run doxygen, which will process the files and generate documentation in the html subdirectory:

$ doxygen

For more details, see the Doxygen homepage.