Factorio Forums

As you may or may not know, Factorio has a Web API that allows developers of 3rd party software to do such things as: log in, download mods, search for game servers or download Factorio updates.
However, this API is not officialy documented, and so whenever a dev wants to use any of it they have to reverse engineer it for themselves.

I, too, was one of these devs. When writing my mod manager ModMyFactory I learned how the API worked.
Now, I had the idea that I could make it a great deal easier for other devs in the future by sharing my knowlege of the API, so they may not have to do what I did back then.

That is why I have created an unofficial API documentation over at my GitHub. It is detailed, fully interactive, contains examples and can be found here:
https://artentus.github.io/FactorioApiDoc/
Special thanks to Danacus for helping me create this.

As is the nature with unofficial solutions, the docs may not be complete or 100% correct. If you are a developer and find anything missing or a mistake, please help us out and contribute over at GitHub.
For example we are currently missing some information about the matchmaking API, and none of us two have actually ever used it so we don't know how to fill it in. Help would be greatly appreciated.

Why aren't you using/improving the documentation hosted on the wiki: https://wiki.factorio.com/Category:Technical ? I saw Danacus improving that, so I don't understand why you are rehosting it.

Firstly, I am not actually registered on the wiki.

I considered applying for an account but when I actually took a look at it I realized I was not at all happy about how the wiki handled this "documentation". I wanted a much finer structure of pages, similar to how big API docs (for example the ones from Microsoft) do it. The wiki just throws everything at a single page with very little guidance and calls it a day, I don't find this particulary useful.

I can imagine part of the problem is that the wiki software is not actually intended for such use. On GitHub I was able to use software specifically designed to host documentation. As a result, it actually looks and feels like one big connected documentation, and not like a bunch of wiki pages thrown together.
The nature as a wiki is just counterproductive for hosting docs. There is too much overhead for other wiki-related stuff. The information gets burried under too much wiki-related stuff, the entire site structure does not optimally depict an API structure.