Create your own API Site in Drupal 6

Last updated May 7, 2012. Created by zzolo on April 7, 2009.
Edited by jhodgdon, mojzis, joachim, Steven Jones. Log in to edit this page.

These instructions are for installing the API Module in a Drupal 6 environment, to build a site similar to http://api.drupal.org.

Note that the API module can parse any documented Drupal code, including contributed modules, independent of Drupal core version. This means the Drupal code you use to run your site need not necessarily be the same as the code you are parsing and displaying. In fact, it is a good idea to keep the code you are parsing and displaying outside of the site running the API module. These instructions are made with that assumption. It also means that although the API module only currently runs with Drupal 6, you can use it to build a site that displays code from Drupal 7, 8, 5, 4.7, etc.

Step 1: Install Drupal and modules

This section assumes you want to have a new Drupal installation for your API site. If you want to use an existing Drupal 6 installation, skip the download/install Drupal steps.

1. Download Drupal 6 at: http://drupal.org/project/drupal
2. Install Drupal. See: http://drupal.org/getting-started/install
3. If you are using API version 6.x-1.6 or earlier, download and install/enable the Job Queue module. For version 6.x-1.7 or later, download and install the Drupal Queue module.
4. Download and install/enable the development version of the Ctools module.
5. Download and install/enable version 7.x-1.2 of the Grammar Parser module. (Note that the 7.x version downloads are meant for all core versions of Drupal and other modules. It is not Drupal-dependent, so it doesn't have Drupal compatibility versions.) In grammar_parser.info, you will need edit the "Core compatibility" line to change the version from 7.x to 6.x in order to enable it. Note that version 7.x-1.2 is the last version that is compatible with Drupal 6.x API module versions. You may need to click on "All releases" on the Grammar Parser project page to find this release.
6. Download and install/enable the API module. You may want to use the Development version to get the most up-to-date code.
7. Change permissions for the API module as needed at: admin/user/permissions

Step 2: Set-up code "repositories"

Once you have Drupal and the modules installed, you need to download some code to parse and display. There are many ways to do this; here we illustrate how to download the Drupal 6 code base using Git.

1. Create a place for your code to go. It needs to be in a place that your web server can access (i.e., within your web document root probably):
   mkdir -p /path/to/your/code/repos/
cd /path/to/your/code/repos/
2. Create a subdirectory for the Drupal 6 code:
   mkdir drupal-6; cd drupal-6
3. Get the most recent version of the Drupal 6 code base (see Version control instructions for Drupal 6.x and the Git handbook for help -- if you want to display code from some other project or branch, you can find the relevant git clone command by going to the project page and visiting the "Version control" tab). Here's the command:
   git clone --branch 6.x http://git.drupal.org/project/drupal.git
4. As an alternative to the previous step, if you don't want to use Git to keep the code updated, you could also just download the Drupal 6 tar.gz or zip archive from http://drupal.org/project/drupal and unpack it into your repository area.
5. Get the extra developer documentation using Git from the "Documentation" project (http://drupal.org/project/documentation). In Drupal 6, this includes the hook documentation, global variable documentation, the Form API reference, and the API documentation landing page. For later versions of Drupal, hook documentation is included in Core.
   git clone --branch 6.x-1.x http://git.drupal.org/project/documentation.git
   (Again, you can also download this from the project page.)

Repeat these steps to create repositories for Drupal 7, other projects, etc.

Note: The API module will not index code in "hidden" directories (directories whose names start with "."). It also skips directories called "CVS", as it scans your directories and their subdirectories.

Step 3: Set-up API module and index code

The last step is to tell the API module where your code repository is, by setting up a "branch", and then indexing the code so it can be displayed. The API module has concepts of "projects" and "branches". Projects correspond to projects on Drupal.org, such as "Drupal Core", "Views", "Zen Theme", etc. Branches correspond to major versions within a Project, such as "6.x" or "6.x-2.x". In the API module, a code repository is designated as a "branch". Here's how to set that up:

1. Go to the site you set up in Step 1, and add a new Branch at: admin/settings/api/branches/new/files. Fill out the form with the following values:
   

   Project Identifier

   Usually you want to use the unique name of the project from Drupal.org, such as "drupal", "views", etc. (this is used in URLs; when adding another branch within the same project, be sure to use the same project identifier so they are connected)

   Project Title

   The capitalized name of the project is appropriate here, such as "Drupal", "Views", etc.

   Branch Identifier

   This is an identifier for this branch within this project, and is used as a URL suffix and in other places. Use "6", "6.x", "6.x-2.x", etc.

   Branch title

   This should include the project name, since it has to stand alone in breadcrumbs and link titles. So it should be something like "Drupal 6", "Views 6.x-2.x", etc.

   Directories

   This is a list of absolute paths to the place(s) where your code is. This is where we put in the value from Step 2. /path/to/your/code/repos/drupal-6

   Click Save Branch.

2. Make sure your new branch is set to be the default branch.
3. Run cron (from admin/reports/status) until your new branch is indexed. You can tell this by looking at the Recent Log Entries report (assuming you have the Database Logging core module enabled) -- when your cron run shows that no "Parse" jobs have run in the latest run, indexing is done. Also, if you visit the API administrative settings page, it will tell you how many parsing jobs are waiting (for version 6.x-1.7 and later). If you use drush and API module 6.x-1.7 or later, you can use drush cron to run cron the first time, and then subsequently use drush queue-cron to run the parse jobs. The difference is that the full cron job will scan all your projects for new files that need parsing, while queue-cron just runs the scheduled parsing jobs (which is a lot faster). If you have the Bash shell available, and Drush, and are running API module 6.x-1.8 or later, here is a sample script that will parse all of your code (although you may have to adjust the for loop to run more times if you have a large number of branches/projects):
   
   #!/bin/bash
echo 'starting cron'
drush cron
for i in {1..60}
do
echo "starting queue run $i"
drush queue-cron
done
4. Go to your new api documentation at: api. The content should resemble the content at http://api.drupal.org.

Step 4: Optional steps

1. Enable the API blocks at: admin/build/block
2. Use Steps 2 and 3 to create a Branch for Drupal 5, 7, etc.
3. Use Steps 2 and 3 to create a Branch for contributed modules