How to generate local API documentation?

[Stephan Dale]

Hi all.

I'm fairly new to Ruby and I'm trying to generate a local copy of the
docs for the core and standard API, as shown online at
http://www.ruby-doc.org/

I ran rdoc in my ruby installation directory (/usr/lib/ruby) but it ate
all my memory so I had to kill it.

Next, I ran rdoc in /usr/lib/ruby/1.8, which worked but produced
documentation that doesn't contain details of certain parts of the
language. For example, searching for "kind_of" reveals that the
assert_kind_of (Test::Unit::Assertions) method is documented, but the
kind_of? (Object) method isn't.

How can I generate local documentation?

Many thanks.

Steph

P.S. Note that I installed ruby with a doc use flag, so ri works
properly, but I couldn't find any html documentation on my system.

 

[Stephan Dale]

Well I've found out why I can't generate core API docs using rdoc -
because Ruby is installed as a .so library, hence there are no .rb or .c
for rdoc to parse.

I've downloaded the documentation from
http://www.ruby-doc.org/downloads/ but the ruby version is not exactly
the same as the one I've got installed, which could obviously lead to
problems in the future.

Does anyone know whether there's any way I can generate html
documentation from the ri docs or the .so libraries?

 

[Jano Svitok]

Well I've found out why I can't generate core API docs using rdoc -
because Ruby is installed as a .so library, hence there are no .rb or .c
for rdoc to parse.

I've downloaded the documentation from
http://www.ruby-doc.org/downloads/ but the ruby version is not exactly
the same as the one I've got installed, which could obviously lead to
problems in the future.

Does anyone know whether there's any way I can generate html
documentation from the ri docs or the .so libraries?

Download source package (either one for your distribution or the
"upstream" source tar from ruby-lang.org). Unpack anywhere (e.g. you
home dir, /usr/src, /tmp,...). From the top directory (where all the
c and .h files are located) run rdoc -o output_path, or add more
arguments to finetune the output. When it's finished, you will have
the docs in output_path. The -o argument is important, because rdoc by
default creates directory "doc" but here the one is already created,
so you have to point rdoc to some other place.

J.

 

[Stephan Dale]

Thank you Jano, that worked a treat!