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Publish Your Ruby Documentation on Github with Rdoc.info

By Peter Cooper / June 19, 2009

cthuluoooo.pngThis post is by Matt Sears of Littlelines.

Rdoc.info is simple web service that uses YARD (a documentation generation tool for Rubyists) to generate documentation for Ruby libraries hosted on Github. If you’re not familiar with YARD, it allows you to add metadata to Ruby documentation similar to other languages such as Java and Objective-C. Another cool thing about YARD is its extensibility and allowing you to plug in custom handlers and output.

Rdoc.info, announced in April, was launched as a side project by Nick Plante. Nick leveraged Github’s post-receive-hooks to automatically generate and host Ruby documentation each time a Github project receives a commit. As a standalone work, Rdoc.info is a smart and simple idea. But wait, there’s more!

Nick teamed up with Jeff Rafter and took the project a step further by making the documentation available on Github itself. Jeff put together Github Has An Apps Platform, a splendid article on how they made this possible. The end result, a sleek RDoc browser hosted at docs.github.com allowing you to quickly view methods, namespaces, and the source code all within Github.

While still young, this project shows a lot of promise. Many popular Ruby libraries have already added their documentation to Github. Projects like Rack, Rspec, and Sinatra to name a few.

To get your documentation on Github, check out the instructions available on the docs.github.com.

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Comments

  1. roger says:

    I suppose this is as good a place as any to note my own site:

    http://allgems.faithpromotingstories.org/gems

    lists all the (currently rubyforge) gems *with their rdocs* and is very nice.

    Slightly different niche.
    Cheers!
    -=r

  2. trans says:

    Nice. I am impressed by this integration.

    A couple of points:

    1. The RDocs are old school. It would be nice to see a more modern template used.

    2. It states that it is based on Gihub Pages. How is that?

    Thanks.

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