Extract documentation from chef cookbooks' attributes files and output it to the cookbook's README.md file.

chef-attrdoc groups attribute initialization lines together with the comments immediately above them. Any lines containing an attribute initialization which are not separated by an empty line are considered a group. The comment immediately above them is assumed to describe the group of attributes below. Groups of attribute initialization lines which are not immediately preceded by a comment line are ignored and will not show up in the output.

chef-attrdoc currently ignores TODO, XXX, NOTE and foodcritic comments.

# gem install chef-attrdoc
# chef-attrdoc ~/cookbooks/mycookbook

chef-attrdoc will try to find an Attributes heading in the README.md file in that directory and replace its contents with the generated attributes/default.rb documentation.

chef-attrdoc uses ruby's stdlib ripper module and so does not have any dependencies.

Here are some example outputs from openstack chef cookbooks:

openstack-compute attributes file - output

openstack-identity attributes file - output