Install doxygen with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository

Commands and aliases

• doxygen

Project history

Doxygen was created and is still associated with Dimitri van Heesch. The official README describes the tool's core bargain: generate online and offline reference documentation from annotated source, optionally analyze undocumented code structure, and also serve as a normal documentation system for manuals and websites.

The official changelog preserves a long release series reaching back through 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3-era releases and continuing into the 1.17 series. The current website banner lists Doxygen 1.17.0 as available with a release date of 30 April 2026.

A notable infrastructure milestone came in May 2013, when the README says Doxygen moved from Subversion to Git hosted at GitHub. The manual and homepage are themselves generated with Doxygen, making the project one of the clearest examples of a documentation tool dogfooding its own output.

Adoption history

Doxygen's adoption tracks the rise of generated API documentation in C and C++ projects. The homepage describes it as widely used in software development, and the README states that it is the de facto standard for C++ source documentation while supporting many other programming and hardware-description languages.

The tool became a standard package across Unix-like systems and developer environments because it sits at the intersection of source annotations, HTML output, LaTeX/PDF manuals, man pages, XML, DocBook, diagrams, and cross-referenced source browsing. It is the sort of package that appears both in developer workstations and in build documentation jobs.

How it is used

A typical project runs doxygen -g to create a Doxyfile, edits configuration tags, then runs doxygen with that configuration. The manual says Doxygen can create HTML, LaTeX/PDF, RTF, XML, Unix man page, and DocBook output and can scan source trees recursively.

Doxygen is also used for code archaeology: with extraction and source-browser options, teams can generate structure views and cross references even for code that was not originally written with full Doxygen comments.

Why package nerds care

For package maintainers, Doxygen is not just another CLI; it is a build-time documentation dependency with optional Graphviz integration, LaTeX/PDF output implications, GUI tooling through Doxywizard, and a large ecosystem of filters and extensions. Version skew can affect generated docs, warning behavior, Markdown handling, language parsers, and reproducible documentation output.

Doxygen also represents a durable packaging pattern: a single cross-platform C++ tool with official binaries, source releases, a generated manual, and broad downstream packaging across Homebrew, Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Nix, MacPorts, Alpine, Scoop, winget, and openSUSE.

Timeline

• 1990s: Doxygen begins its long 1.x release history, with old changelog entries preserved for early 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3 releases.
• 2013: Source code management moved from Subversion to Git hosted at GitHub.
• 2024: 1.11.0 release series added modern Markdown-related support such as GitHub-style alerts.
• 2026: 1.17.0 announced on the official site with a 30 April 2026 release date.

Related projects

• Doxygen is often paired with Graphviz for generated diagrams and with LaTeX tooling for PDF output. Its official extensions page lists filters and related tools for additional languages and diagram formats, while Doxywizard is the graphical frontend documented in the manual.

Sources

• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/doxygen/doxygen/master/README.md - official README for purpose, supported languages, output formats, and the May 2013 GitHub migration.
• https://www.doxygen.nl/ - official homepage for current positioning and latest release banner.
• https://www.doxygen.nl/manual/starting.html - official getting-started documentation for Doxyfile creation and common usage.
• https://www.doxygen.nl/manual/config.html - official configuration documentation for Doxyfile format.
• https://www.doxygen.nl/manual/changelog.html - official changelog for the long 1.x release series.
• https://www.doxygen.nl/helpers.html - official extensions page for related filters and companion tools.
• https://api.github.com/repos/doxygen/doxygen - official GitHub repository metadata.