rustdoc-markdown 0.91.0

A tool to convert Rust documentation to Markdown, for use with LLMs
Documentation

rustdoc-markdown

This crate extracts documentation from crates.io packages and renders it into a monolithic markdown document.

The initial use case was for generating documentation context for large language models.

In some places the markdown is not technically valid since some headers nest higher than the h6 level, but it's assumed an LLM would benefit more from the consistent structure.

As a trade-off that reduces the size of the output, but makes the documentation of types more indirect, there is support for rolling up "Common Traits" for the crate and for each module so that the list of implemented traits, per-type, can be more concise. This feature can be disabled.

If a package contains a README.md and examples in an examples/ directory, these are also folded into the documentation.

Command Line

Install:

cargo install rustdoc-markdown

Generate Markdown for rustdoc-types version 0.39.0:

rustdoc-markdown print rustdoc-types 0.39.0 --output rustdoc-types-api.md

Generate Markdown for a local crate:

rustdoc-markdown print my-local-crate --manifest path/to/my-local-crate/Cargo.toml --output my-local-crate-api.md

Library Usage

rustdoc-markdown can also be used as a library to integrate documentation generation into other tools.

See the library documentation for rustdoc_markdown::Printer for an example of how to:

  1. Find a crate on crates.io.
  2. Download and unpack it.
  3. Run rustdoc to get the rustdoc_types::Crate data.
  4. Read extra information like README and examples.
  5. Use the Printer to generate the Markdown documentation.

Cargo limitations

One awkward paper cut with the rustdoc-markdown CLI is that the --build-dir option cannot point within a Cargo project/ workspace, due to the way it needs to unpack and inspect packages from crates.io.

The problem is that Cargo will unconditionally walk up the filesystem looking for Cargo.toml files to find the workspace root and it will get confused while trying to inspect a package if it then finds an un-related Cargo.toml above it.

By default the --build-dir will be set to a temporary directory like /tmp/rust-markdown-<crate_name> to avoid this problem.

Ideally though Cargo should have some mechanism for limiting how far up the filesystem it searches for workspaces so that it's possible to sandbox it's behavior.

Ref:

Dependencies

It depends on:

  • nightly-2025-11-22 Rust toolchain.
  • rustdoc-types version 0.57.

See the changelog for rustdoc-types for compatibility information when updating the toolchain: https://github.com/rust-lang/rustdoc-types/blob/trunk/CHANGELOG.md

Versioning

This project aims to have it's minor version track the minor version of the most recent stable Rust release that's aligned with the nightly toolchain it depends on.

License

Licensed under either of

at your option.