doc2dash

doc2dash is an extensible Documentation Set (docset) generator that helps you to have documentation for all your favorite APIs in Dash.app-compatible API browsers.

An API browser is an application that runs locally on your computer and allows you to search various API docs by pressing a key combination and starting to type (I have bound it to Alt-Space bar and can't write code without it).

The most common ones – Dash.app (macOS) and Zeal (Windows and Linux) – come with many docsets out of the box, but they can never offer you docsets for every package you'll ever use. This is where doc2dash comes in: It takes your offline documentation and converts it into an indexed format that API browsers can read and search (very fast!).

Currently it supports all known intersphinx-based documentation systems like Sphinx, pydoctor, or MkDocs (with mkdocstrings). While doc2dash is a Python project, the support is not limited to Python-related formats.

It's also extendable: you can write your own parser!

Project Information

• License: MIT
• PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/doc2dash/
• Source Code: https://github.com/hynek/doc2dash
• Documentation: https://doc2dash.rtfd.io/
• Changelog: https://github.com/hynek/doc2dash/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md
• Supported Python Versions: 3.8 and later (check the changelog for past releases that support much older Python versions)
• Platforms: pre-compiled binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows available; also runs on everything that runs Python

Release Information for 3.0.0 - 2022-09-13

Removed

• Since pydoctor added support for intersphinx in version 21.2.0, the dedicated HTML-parsing parser has been removed. If you need to parse legacy pydoctor docs, please use doc2dash 2.4.1.

Added

• Stand-alone binaries! If your platform is supported, you can now download binaries from the release page without dealing with Python at all – courtesy of PyOxidizer.
• intersphinx: documentation based on MkDocs with mkdocstrings metadata is now supported.
• intersphinx: if no explicit name is passed, the docset name is derived von the documentation's metadata (and not the directory name, which is more often than not just html).
• We use rich for output and progress bars now. This allows us more granular progress indication.
• Documentation on writing your own parser plugins.

Changed

• Tons of refactorings that probably broke your custom parsers. Sorry about that and let us know, if we can help you fixing them.
• intersphinx: We now parse objects.inv files on our own. Sphinx is not a dependency anymore.
• intersphinx: Files that are indexed by intersphinx, but don't exist aren't added to the docset anymore. Common example is py-modindex.html. #113 #115
• We now check if the index page passed via --index-page / -I exists and fail if it doesn't.

Credits

doc2dash is written and maintained by Hynek Schlawack and released under the MIT license.

The development is kindly supported by my employer Variomedia AG and all my amazing GitHub Sponsors.

A full list of contributors can be found on GitHub's overview.