Heads up: reimagining artifact 3.0, check it out at artifact_py

Artifact: design documentation for everybody

Note: this project, and the python re-write, should now be considered
abandoned. Please use it as you see fit.

• Tutorial
• Rendered Design Documents
• Leaving Feedback

Artifact is the simple, linkable and trackable design documentation tool for
everybody. It allows anyone to write and link their design documents both to
each other and to source code, making it easy to know how complete their
project is. Documents are revision controllable, can be edited in the browser
and have a full suite of command line tools for searching, displaying,
checking, exporting and formatting them.

Writing detailed design documents is one of the core pillars of quality software
development. Design documents are how you capture the requirements (purpose) of
your project and link them to your specifications (how you will build it). They
let you get your ideas on paper before writing code, and help you have fewer
painful refactors. They create a reference for developers and curious users of
how and why your project was developed a certain way, and make it easier to
refactor your project when that becomes necessary.

Even though design documents are critical to the quality of software, there
are very few tools for writing them and integrating them into the larger context
of a project. Artifact aims to fill the major gap in quality best practices by
making writing good design documents useful to the average developer.

First of all, artifact makes it easy to write design documents in text files
and link them by just specifying their partof attribute. This allows
developers to put their design documents under revision control, review them
using regular code review tools and use all the normal text processing tools
(vim, grep, sed, etc) to view, edit and refactor them. Artifact also provides
some command line tools of its own.

Secondly, design documents can be linked to source-code through a language
agnostic syntax (#ART-name anywhere in the source code). Once linked, anyone
reading the comment can easily look up the relevant design documents. In the
same way, anyone looking at the Web UI can see exactly where a specification or
test is implemented in code. Furthermore, if the name of a design doc changes,
art check will tell you where your dangling references are. Never again will
you have to be scared of refactoring your design documents because your
references in code will be out of date.

Finally, artifact exports a beautiful rendered view of your design documents
onto sites like github-sites (example) and you can edit in your browser
using art serve. This completes the self documenting nature and allows
anyone (even non-developers!) to view and edit the design documents of their
project.

In this way, artifact aims to unify other quality best practices while also
make writing design documents more fun and useful in your day to day
development efforts.

Jump into artifact with the youtube commercial and the
Tutorial.

Also, view artifact's own design docs.

Support The Project

You can support the project by ⭐ staring it on github and 💚
sharing it with your friends, coworkers and social media. You can also leave
direct feedback.

Licensing

Goals

The intent of the artifact licensing is that:

• The artifact application be open source for anyone to use for any
  purpose (dual licensed MIT + Apache).
• Anything generated by artifact can be licensed any way the user wishes
  to, including the built static html pages.
• Any documents, tutorials or specifications for artifact (except the code
  and logo) remain public domain and can be used for any purpose at all.

Specifics

All documentation and tutorials for the artifact application are released under
the CC0 Creative Commons Public Domain License with the intent that you should
feel free to copy, paste and modify any of the designs, guides examples or
exported data for any purpose (including commercial) without the need of
attribution. You can read more about CC0 here:
https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/

The CC0 license applies to:

• All project docs
• The Artifact Design Documents
  (also located in design/)
• The Artifact Wiki
• Any file or data created by any artifact command, including:
  • documents created by art init
  • compiled html/css/json files created by art export

The artifact logo (named Tula) is licensed under Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) and can be used by the artifact project for
any purpose without needing additional attribution. The artifact logo is located
in ci/docs/logo and was originally created by
packapotatoes.

Source Code License

The source code is Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or
  http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or
  http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted
for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall
be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.