Introduction

The AsyncAPI generator is a tool that generates anything you want using the AsyncAPI Document and Template that are supplied as inputs to the AsyncAPI CLI. The generator was built with extensibility in mind; you can use the generator to generate anything you want, provided that it can be defined in a template, such as code, diagrams, markdown files, microservices, and applications. A number of community-maintained templates are now available for immediate usage.

Generator use cases

• Generation of interactive and understandable API documentation
• Generation of APIs' client libraries
• Generation of APIs' boilerplate code

Generator advantages

• Quick to setup and easy to use on a regular basis
• Effortless generation of complex documents
• Number of community maintained AsyncAPI templates

Generation process

1. The Generator receives the Template and AsyncAPI Document as inputs.
2. The Generator sends to the Parser the asyncapiString which is a stringified version of the original AsyncAPI Document.
3. The Parser uses additional plugins such as the OpenAPI, RAML, or Avro schemas to validate custom schemas of message payloads defined in the AsyncAPI Document.
4. If the Parser determines that the original AsyncAPI Document is valid, it manipulates the document and returns a set of helper functions and properties and bundles them together into an asyncapi variable that is an instance of AsyncAPIDocument. The asyncapi helper functions make it easier to access the contents of the AsyncAPI Document.
5. At this point, the Generator passes the asyncapi, the originalAsyncAPI, and the params which collectively make up the Template Context to the Render Engine.
6. AsyncAPI has two Render Engines(react and nunjucks. Depending on which one you've specified in your package.json, the Generator knows the right Render Engine to pass both the Template Files and the Template Context.
7. Once the Render Engine receives the Template Files and the Template Context, it injects all the dynamic values in your react or nunjucks based Template Files using the Template Context. As a result, the Render Engine generates markdown, pdf, boilerplate code, and anything else you specified to be generated as output.

You can generate anything you want using the generator as long as it can be defined in a Template.

The diagram below depicts the entire process of passing the Template and AsyncAPI Document to the AsyncAPI generator tool, how the generator uses these inputs to generate the desired output, and example outputs you can get from the render engine.

params are template-specific options passed to the asyncapi generate fromTemplate CLI command to customize the generated output.