I built an API in C, couldn't document it, so I accidentally created an open-source tool

## It started with C and suffering A while back I built an API in C. Yes, C — I am weird, I know. Using Mongoose — an embedded HTTP server library for C/C++ by Cesanta (not to be confused with Mongoose.js, the Node ODM). Every route, every handler, every response — written by hand. **No framework. No annotation type system. No decorators.** When I was done, I went looking for a documentation tool and immediately ran into a problem. ## Why Swagger didn't work Swagger and OpenAPI are great, but they work **by reading metadata** from your code: annotations, decorators, type definitions. Java has them. Python has them. Node has them. Raw C? Nothing. No reflection, no annotations, no schema to scrape. **My API had zero metadata** — I have built everything manually, so there was nothing for a tool to discover automatically. You can write an OpenAPI YAML spec by hand, but no tool will generate it for you from C code. Or if you are only using Mongoose to create your API. ## So I built something I made a small static page that reads an api.json file and renders interactive API documentation. No backend. No build step. Just HTML + CSS + vanilla JS. <u>So it is completely language and framework agnostic.</u> The JSON describes your API — tables, endpoints, parameters, responses, auth — and Tabula turns it into a browsable, interactive doc site. ```json { "settings": { "title": "My API" }, "tables": [ { "name": "posts", "primaryKey": "id", "columns": [ { "name": "id", "type": "integer" }, { "name": "title", "type": "string" } ] } ] } ``` ## Then I realized that I built a complete doc generation tool Halfway through polishing it, I stepped back and noticed: this isn't just a workaround for my weird C project. This is a documentation tool for any API where you want full control — where you can't or don't want to rely on code introspection. So I did what you do when that happens: I cleaned it up properly. - Wrote a **CLI** (`init`, `validate`, `serve`, `sync`) - Added a **zero-dependency linter** that validates your `api.json` before you deploy - Created three **example projects** (`minimal`, `blog`, `e-commerce`) - Set up **CI**, wrote **docs**, **published** to npm ## Try it (please 🥸) ```bash npx tabula-docs init my-docs cd my-docs npx tabula-docs serve . ``` Open `http://localhost:3000`. Edit `api.json`. Reload. That's it. 🔗 [Live demo](https://lauwed.github.io/tabula-docs/) ⭐ [GitHub](https://github.com/Lauwed/tabula-docs) 📦 [NPM](https://www.npmjs.com/package/tabula-docs) <u>It's v0.1.3 and still early</u>. I'd love feedback — especially on the JSON schema design. Does it feel intuitive? Is anything confusing or missing? And if you're building something weird in C: **you're not alone**. --- _PS: This post has been generated by Claude, based on my storytelling that I wrote myself. I wanted to be sure that the English would understandable and share correctly my story! I am really proud of this little project, this is my first open source project I fully committed to and went through to the end._