# Generating documentation for a PHP codebase > Generate high-quality documentation for your PHP codebase effortlessly. This guide shows you how to use the phpDocumentor Docker image to create documentation with a single command. ---  **TL;DR** This article shows how to generate a browsable documentation site for a PHP codebase (using WordPress core as the example) with zero local install: a `phpdoc.xml` config file plus a single `docker run ... phpdoc/phpdoc:3` command scans the `src` folder and outputs a full HTML documentation site to `.phpdoc/index.html`. You've got a PHP codebase and you wish — hop, hop, two shakes of a lamb's tail — to generate a documentation site without any headaches. Simple! [phpDocumentor](https://docs.phpdoc.org/) does it for you, and since a Docker image exists, you can do almost all of this by running just one command. ## One command, a full documentation website From the root of your PHP project, run: ```bash $ docker run -it --rm -u $(id -u):$(id -g) -v .:/data phpdoc/phpdoc:3 ``` And here is what lands in the `.phpdoc` folder — this one was generated from the WordPress codebase: > Screenshot — http\://localhost/ > >  A browsable site with the namespaces, the classes, their methods and the docblocks you wrote. Nothing was installed on your machine: phpDocumentor, PHP and every dependency live inside the image, which disappears with the container thanks to `--rm`. ## The configuration file [phpDocumentor](https://docs.phpdoc.org/) requires a configuration file to know what to scan and where to write. Please create a new file called `phpdoc.xml` with this content, in your project's directory: **phpdoc.xml** ```xml

./.phpdoc

/tmp/phpdoc src/ ``` That's what tells the command above to scan the `src` folder and to create the `.phpdoc` directory where the documentation will be saved. > **WSL2 - Windows:** > > If you're running under WSL2, to get access to the documentation, just run `powershell.exe .phpdoc/index.html` file to start the documentation. Read the [Starting the default associated Windows program on WSL](/blog/wsl-powershell) or [Open your Linux folder in Windows Explorer](/blog/wsl-windows-explorer) for more information. **No PHP project at hand? Grab a big one to play with.** For the illustration above, I used the WordPress codebase. Please start a Linux shell and run `mkdir -p /tmp/wordpress && cd $_`. Then run `curl -L --silent -o wordpress-develop-6.4.2.zip https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-develop/archive/refs/tags/6.4.2.zip` to download WordPress v6.4.2. You'll get a file called `wordpress-develop-6.4.2.zip` on your disk. Unzip it by running `unzip wordpress-develop-6.4.2.zip && rm wordpress-develop-6.4.2.zip` and now, you'll have a folder called `wordpress-develop-6.4.2` so please jump in it `cd wordpress-develop-6.4.2`. ## Conclusion One `docker run`, one XML file, and any PHP codebase — yours, or one you've just inherited — becomes a documentation site you can browse. The interesting part isn't the generation itself, it's that the quality of the output is a direct mirror of the docblocks in the code: run it on a project once and you immediately see where the documentation effort actually went. Bash has no phpDocumentor equivalent, which is why I wrote my own; see [Linux - Generate documentation from Bash scripts](/blog/linux-generate-documentation-from-bash-scripts). And for documentation that isn't extracted from code at all, there's [Quarto - How I Built a Self-Documenting Ecosystem for 50+ Projects](/blog/quarto-industrialisation).