Reading this guide helps you to get started with Scalar Docs, literally in minutes. You don’t need anything to get started, not even account if just want to play around.

GuidesCopied!

Note: Guides are part of our Scalar Pro plan (read below).

In the top left corner, you’ll see a “Guide” tab. This is where you land by default.

Guides are basically a blank sheet of paper. You can just start writing your documentation, your guidelines, your knowledge base — whatever you want to write.

If you’re serious about this, you can create an account here to make sure your changes are saved.

API ReferencesCopied!

This is a free feature. You’ll even get a nice ${whatever-you-like}.apidocumentation.com subdomain.

Every project can have one, or even multiple API references: In the top left corner, you’ll see a “Reference” tab. Try to click on it to switch to our OpenAPI editor.

OpenAPI is the most popular standard to describe your API in a machine readble format. No matter which languages, libraries or frameworks you’re using to build your API, it’s very, very likely there’s a tool, plugin or package to generate an OpenAPI document for you. If you don’t find something which says “OpenAPI”, look for “Swagger”. It’s what it used be called a few years ago, before it was an open standard.

Anyway, those OpenAPI documents are what we base all our tools on. So once you’ve got one, it should be straight-forward to use our tools.

Scalar Docs offers multiple ways to connect your OpenAPI document. Pick whatever fits your workflow:

• Paste your OpenAPI document in the editor
• Upload an OpenAPI document to the editor
• Import an URL (you can even create a “Live Link”, which means it’ll fetch updates from the URL vs. just fetching it once)
• Sync your OpenAPI document from GitHub

Scalar ProCopied!

Most of our stuff is actually freely available. You might consider to upgrade to a Scalar Pro account, though:

It gives you access to custom domains, the GitHub sync, guides, versioning of your guides, TypeSense search and even priority support and a private Discord channel or a dedicated Slack connect channel (if you like).