Automatic documentation for your Cloud Endpoints API, now in GA

We’re excited to announce that Cloud Endpoints Portal has graduated from beta and is now generally available. When you use Google Cloud Endpoints to manage any of your APIs, you can now provision documentation for the developers on your team with a single click in the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) console. After that, any API that you push to your GCP project through gcloud automatically gets pushed to your portal to update your API’s reference documentation, called SmartDocs.

API documentation is where a developer turns to understand how an API works. We’ve combined GCP’s and Apigee’s expertise in API usability and developer experience into SmartDocs, which you can use for both Cloud Endpoints Portal and Apigee’s integrated developer portal.

SmartDocs renders an OpenAPI or gRPC spec into the information a developer needs to write code that successfully calls your API, and it includes an interactive “Try this API” widget—the same widget that powers Google’s own API documentation, like these for Calendar, Books, and Gmail. With Cloud Endpoints Portals, this means your documentation is always up to date, even as your API changes.

You can see here how you can interact with the API without leaving the API documentation:

In addition to SmartDocs, you can map your own custom domain onto the portal (provisioning an SSL certificate automatically), and customize settings to make the site reflect your style. And if you need to add content to the documentation, such as a how-to or FAQ, you can add pages using Markdown. Check out this demonstration portal to get a sense of what this looks like. A special feature of this demo portal allows you to upload your own OpenAPI specification to see immediately how it renders, so that you can preview what the end results might look like before you’ve even begun to use Cloud Endpoints.

We’re grateful to all the Cloud Endpoints users who tested the developer portal through its alpha and beta phases—your feedback inspired us to make this a better tool for all of our users.

Getting started with Cloud Endpoints Portal is easy. If you are already using Cloud Endpoints, click “Create portal” in the Cloud Console. If you’re not using Cloud Endpoints yet, click the “Try your own API button” in the demonstration portal to upload your own spec and create docs.

Stay tuned for more features to make API management easier.