Dart Doc Validation

1. When to use this skill

Use this skill when:

Writing or updating documentation comments (///) in Dart code.
Checking for broken documentation links, references, or macros.
Preparing a package for publishing to pub.dev.

Discovery

To find documentation issues:

Missing Lint

Verify if the comment_references lint is enabled:

Target: analysis_options.yaml
Search Query: comment_references

Automated Validation

Run the documentation generator to surface warnings:

Command: dart doc -o $(mktemp -d)
Keywords to look for: warning:, unresolved doc reference, undefined macro

2. Best Practices

Enable the doc validation lint

In your analysis_options.yaml, enable the comment_references lint.

linter:
  rules:
    - comment_references

Validating Documentation Locally

Use the dart doc command with a temporary output directory to validate documentation comments without polluting the local project workspace.

This command parses all documentation comments and reports warnings such as:

warning: unresolved doc reference
warning: undefined macro

Command to run:

dart doc -o $(mktemp -d)

This will work on Mac and Linux.

This ensures that the generated HTML files are stored in a temporary location and don't clutter the package directory, while still surfacing all validation warnings in the terminal output.

Browsing the docs:

Our docs use features designed to be run on a web server. If you want to browse the generated docs locally, install the dhttpd package.

pub global activate dhttpd
TMP_DIR=$(mktemp -d) && dart doc -o "$TMP_DIR" &&  dhttpd --path "$TMP_DIR"

(Or use another HTTP server, such as python3 -m http.server.)

Fixing Common Warnings

Unresolved doc reference: Ensure that any identifier wrapped in square brackets ([Identifier]) correctly points to an existing class, method, property, or parameter in the current scope or imported libraries.
Undefined macro: If using {@macro macro_name}, ensure that the template {@template macro_name} is defined in the same file or a file that is imported and visible to the documentation generator.

dart-doc-validation