FAQ
Short answers to the questions people ask before and after adopting OrbitDocs.
Short answers, each with a link to the full page.
Getting started
Yes. Everything is MIT-licensed: the CLI, the docs site, the API client, private docs, Ask AI, SDK generation and the self-hosted platform. There is no paid tier and no hosted service.
No. NestJS gets automatic extraction, decorators and mountOrbitDocs. Any other API works with a spec file or URL:
apis: [{ id: 'payments', source: { file: './openapi.yaml' } }],See Multiple APIs.
No. Set routes: 'all' and every route Swagger documents appears, titled by @ApiOperation and grouped by @ApiTags. The @Docs* decorators are optional extras. See Decorators.
The default is routes: 'opt-in': only routes marked with @DocsOperation() appear, so internal and admin routes can't leak by accident. Mark the routes, or switch to routes: 'all'.
No. The module is loaded in Nest preview mode, which instantiates no providers. Code that runs on import still runs, so you may need placeholder variables in source.nest.env. See Extraction.
Node 22.12 or later.
Hosting
Anywhere that serves files: Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, GitHub Pages, S3 + CloudFront, nginx, a Docker image, inside your Nest app, or on the self-hosted platform. See Deploy.
No. A static host serves every file to everyone. Serve the docs from your Nest app, run them in server mode (Vercel, containers), or host them on the platform.
Not in this version. It supports the Express adapter. Deploy the docs to a static host or in server mode instead.
No. One team publishing one site needs only the CLI. The platform helps when many teams publish many sites and you want previews, a registry, roles and an audit log in one place. See Self-hosted platform.
No, it hosts static builds. It adds private docs, Ask AI, MCP and analytics itself, so you don't lose those features.
Features
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint (Ollama, vLLM, OpenRouter, Azure OpenAI). You bring the key; it stays in an environment variable on your server. See AI providers.
TypeScript, Python, Go, Java, C# and PHP. Languages other than TypeScript need Java 11 or later on the machine that runs orbitdocs sdk. See SDKs.
SSO presets for Google, Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, Auth0, Clerk and Keycloak. Or reuse your product's own session from Supabase, Clerk, Firebase or Appwrite. See SSO and App session.
No. These are out of scope. The six presets above are OpenID Connect underneath, which covers most company identity providers.
No. Breaking-change detection and changelogs are left to you. Write changelog pages as MDX guides. The platform registry keeps every spec revision, so you can download two revisions and compare them with the tool you prefer.
Not yet. They are planned but not built.
Yes. Pass them to orbitMdxComponents in the guides route. See MDX components.
Coming from Scalar
Both have a modern API reference and API client. OrbitDocs also runs the parts Scalar only offers hosted (guides, registry, SDKs, MCP) on your own infrastructure, and adds GitLab sync, SCIM and an audit log. See the full comparison.
Yes. Point source.file or source.url at it. Extraction from NestJS is optional.