appledoc.sh

Dump an Apple framework's documentation to plain text, straight from the JSON API that backs developer.apple.com/documentation.

Apple's docs site is a client-side app. For a page at https://developer.apple.com/documentation/<path>, the actual content lives at https://developer.apple.com/tutorials/data/documentation/<path>.json. This script crawls that API starting from a framework (or any symbol) and emits readable text: title, abstract, and declaration for each symbol, indented by hierarchy depth.

This is handy for getting a framework's docs into a single text file you can grep, diff, or feed to an LLM — particularly useful for frameworks or APIs that are newer than a model's training cutoff.

Why

If you're working with a recent or beta Apple framework, your editor's autocomplete and an LLM's training data can both be behind what's actually shipping. This script gets you a flat, readable snapshot of the official docs so you (or a tool) have current ground truth to work from.

Requirements

• bash
• curl
• jq

Usage

./appledoc.sh <path> [-d DEPTH] [-o OUTFILE] [-q QPS] [--resume]

• <path> — the bit after /documentation/, e.g. swiftui or swiftui/view
• -d, --depth — how deep to recurse into child symbols (default 1)
  • 0 = just this page
  • 1 = top-level symbols + their signatures (good for browsing)
  • 2+ = members of each type (gets large; thousands of requests)
• -o, --out — output file (default: <path-with-underscores>.txt)
• -q, --qps — max requests/second, be polite to Apple (default 4)
• --resume — reuse the on-disk cache from a prior run instead of refetching
• -h, --help — show help

Examples

./appledoc.sh swiftui                      # top-level SwiftUI symbols
./appledoc.sh swiftui/view -d 2            # View and its members, deep
./appledoc.sh foundation -d 1 -o fnd.txt   # to a named file

Sample output

## View
   A type that represents part of your app's user interface and provides
   modifiers that you use to configure views.
   protocol View

  ## body
     The content and behavior of the view.
     associatedtype Body : View

Notes

• This is an unofficial tool. It scrapes the public JSON endpoint that backs Apple's own docs website — it is not an Apple API and isn't affiliated with or endorsed by Apple. Be polite with -q (the default of 4 requests/second is a reasonable starting point); if you see fetch failures, lower it.
• Only covers published docs. Unreleased/beta SDK symbols won't be on the server — use xcrun swift symbolgraph-extract against the beta SDK for those.
• Responses are cached under a temp directory; --resume points back at the newest cache from a prior run so you can re-crawl without refetching everything.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.