The 3 Step Guide to Slick Local Documentation for all your Ruby Gems
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about RubyDoc.info, a "good looking, up-to-date Ruby documentation" site powered by YARD. Well, as of YARD 0.6 you can get the same greatness that RubyDoc.info provides applied to your local machine's collection of gems in just a few steps. Try it out - you won't regret it.
Step 1: Install YARD. Install the yard gem with sudo gem install yard or similar.
Step 2: Run the YARD server. Run yard server --gems. Take note of the hostname and port given in the output.
Step 3: Get browsing. Visit http://0.0.0.0:8808/, where the IP address and port should be replaced with those provided by the YARD server. This URL should work for most of you though.
How does it look? Here's the overall view of all installed gems:
And here's a specific gem's documentation:
There's a lot more to YARD than merely serving up documentation - it's primarily a tool for generating it from both RDoc and YARD-enhanced RDoc formats. Learn more at Loren Segal's YARD 0.6.0 release post or from the GitHub project.
September 14, 2010 at 7:29 am
Yard is great. May be you should add $yard gems --rebuild in order to rebuild the documentation of the already installed gems
September 14, 2010 at 8:07 am
That's pretty cool, guess I can drop the --no-rdoc from my .gemrc now :)
September 14, 2010 at 10:45 am
The new reload feature of the YARD server is really neat for doing development.
yard server --reload
September 14, 2010 at 1:11 pm
Nice! This saved my day!
September 14, 2010 at 1:46 pm
I made a rackup file so you can run the YARD gem server in any Rack-based server, including Passenger. With Passenger Preference Pane, that makes it pretty easy to use gems.local instead of an awkward IP and port.
http://gist.github.com/562448
September 14, 2010 at 2:34 pm
I thought I'd mention that YARD supports the markdown & textile markup languages too, and not just SimpleMarkup(RDoc).
The YARD meta tags help you write better documentation too, and I hope everybody starts to use them =)
September 14, 2010 at 5:32 pm
Here's how you get it in all your rubies if you're using RVM: http://jschoolcraft.posterous.com/the-3-step-guide-to-slick-local-documentation
September 16, 2010 at 3:09 pm
0.0.0.0 is a network address. Do macs not have a loopback address (127.0.0.1) ?
September 18, 2010 at 2:53 pm
I'm the only one who prefers SDoc? O.o
http://railsapi.com/
September 19, 2010 at 6:55 pm
Sure, that works too.
September 20, 2010 at 11:00 am
yard really does look good. Is there anything comparable to python's sphinx documentation generator in ruby world.
September 21, 2010 at 3:15 pm
That's an awesome gem, for sure it'll help a lot
September 23, 2010 at 12:57 pm
You'll probably find http://localhost:8808 works better ...