# Launchpad API docs generation The Launchpad API documentation portal is available at [https://api.launchpad.net/](https://api.launchpad.net/). It contains summaries of the different web service versions, and links to version-specific documents. To define our web resources we are using the [lazr.restful](https://lazrrestful.readthedocs.io/en/latest/webservice-declarations.html) decorators and capabilities. These decorators are also responsible to generate the related documentation for the exported fields. We can build API docs using `make apidoc` command: this command will generate the documentation under `lib/canonical/launchpad/apidoc`. #### NOTE Note that we should delete the aforementioned folder in order to generate fresh docs. ```bash $ rm -rf lib/canonical/launchpad/apidoc $ make apidoc ``` The command above is responsible for calling the `utilities/create-lp-wadl-and-apidoc.py` script and generating the related documentation using the `lp.services.webservice.wadl` module utilities. This script will create the related `wadl` file and translate it to `HTML`. During this process `generate_html` function will be called: this function is responsible to map `wadl` entries to `HTML`. For that we use `wadl-to-refhtml.xsl` template. In this file we can also apply patches to fix not-well generated entry points for given `wadl` entries. ## Example For example for the `SocialAccount` webservice we used the `@exported_as_webservice_entry("social_account", as_of="beta")` decorator. Thanks to that the `social_account` entry is created. We can use the aforementioned id to refer this `wadl` entry in the `wadl-to-refhtml.xsl` file. Let’s say that we want to change the entry URL from `URL: https://api.launchpad.net/beta/` to `URL: https://api.launchpad.net/beta//+socialaccount/`: we should create an entry inside the `find-entry-uri` template inside the `wadl-to-refhtml.xsl` file and we should search for `wadl` entry using the `social_account` id. After that we can write `xsl` code that will append the right string to the `$base` URL: ```html / <person.name> /+socialaccount/ <id> ``` The resulting URL will be: `URL: https://api.launchpad.net/beta//+socialaccount/`