How to write Swagger documentation for Laravel API. Tips & examples

API documentation becomes very necessary when you split the team into Backend and Frontend. And even more when you divide your monorepo into parts or even microservices.

I will show you how easily create API documentation for your Laravel API using swagger.

Let’s start. I prefer using this package. This package is a wrapper of Swagger-php and swagger-ui adapted to work with Laravel.

composer require "darkaonline/l5-swagger"

Then publish config and all view files:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider "L5Swagger\L5SwaggerServiceProvider"

Next, open a config/l5-swagger.php file. Let’s walk through essential keys:

• routes.api — This is an URL for accessing documentation UI. Your frontend team will be using it to access documentation. By default, it is api/documentation . I prefer changing it to something smaller like api/docs
• generate_always — I prefer disabling it as it will generate docs on the fly. Not useful with big API. You can always manually run php artisan l5-swagger:generate

Those are the most important to start. Now if you try to create docs using this command

php artisan l5-swagger:generate

It will return an error

Required @OA\Info() not found