rake doc:app, rdoc and private methods

rake doc:app

Ruby on Rails provides a rake task that can generate documentation for your rails application. The documentation is placed in the doc/app directory.

rake doc:app

This is convenient, but the down side is that if you want to generate the documentation for your private methods you have to add the :doc: directive to your method declaration, as follows:

private
  def the_private_method #:doc:
    # Do stuff
  end

rdoc

You can generate exactly the same documentation as 'rake doc:app' using the rdoc command. Note that we specify where the documentation should be written using the --op option.

rdoc app --op doc/app

If you want to generate documentation for your private methods, add the --all option. Doing this, you do not need to add the :doc: directive to your method declaration.

rdoc app --op doc/app --all