Collection-based Raku Documentation

Description Distribution to set up Raku Documentation website.

Author Richard Hainsworth, aka finanalyst

Installation
Raku-Doc
Raku-Doc as a wrapper for Collection::collect
More contemporary web site.
In the future (not now)
Enabling Cro App
Highlighting
Problems
Copyright and License

This Module creates a local website of the Raku documentation. It pulls together information held in several other distributions. The main content of this distribution is the Raku-Doc utility. It is intended to be as simple as possible. But the documentation system is large. The following contain other requirements.

The documentation files are held in a github repository that is maintained and updated by the Raku community. Raku-Doc needs to have a local clone of the repository. It can be used to refresh the documents automatically.
Raku-Doc uses Collection and Raku::Pod::Render to link all the Rakudoc (aka Pod6) files together. So Collection needs to be installed, which will install Raku::Pod::Render. By installing Raku-Pod-Render a user can then use Pod::To::HTML2 to render individual .rakudoc / .pod6 files into HTML, or Pod::To::MarkDown2 to render them into .md files.
Collection requires over a dozen plugins, which are automatically refreshed from a github repository by Raku-Doc.
The Raku documentation system can currently be visualised in two ways:
- using the original web design started by Moritz Lenz (using the mode Website) - currently the default.
- using a new design by OgdenWebb (using the mode OgdenWebb).
The website is intended to be served locally with a Cro app. Since making Cro a dependency can cause problems in a testing environment, the META6.json does not have Cro as a dependency. If Cro::HTTP is not installed, the completion plugin will exit with a note.
A website contains templates and structure documents, which describe the website into which the Raku documentation fit. This content is also held in a separate repository. This is intended to keep the development of plugins separate from the structure documents and templates, and separate from the Raku documentation content.

Installation

zef install Collection-Raku-Documentation

This installs the Collection (and other) dependencies and the Raku-Doc executable. These in turn install the the other main distributions and Raku::Pod::Render. By default Raku::Pod::Render does not install the highlighter automatically because node.js and npm are required.

See Highlighting for installation of highlighter.

Raku-Doc

On a Linux based distributions, Raku-Doc depends on git and unzip, which typically are installed by default, to get and unpack other files.

Under Linux, in a terminal, the following will lead to the installation of a local copy of Raku docs and start a Cro app that will make the HTML documentation available in a browser at localhost:30000, and produce a progress status bar for the longer stages.

mkdir ~/raku-collection
cd raku-collection
Raku-Doc Init

This sets up a Collection directory by downloading the Website mode from github, then installs the Collection plugins.

By default the Raku/doc repository (containing all the Raku documentation files) will be created in the next step as local_raku_docs.

If a user wants to clone the Raku docs repository elsewhere or has an existing clone of the Raku repository, then the non-default path needs to be put into the config.raku file in the sources-obtain and sources-refresh keys. See the documentation for the Collection distribution for more information.

At the next invocation of Raku-Doc, the documentation source will be cloned, cached, and rendered.

For example, to render the full Raku Docs, the following would work, where raku-local is a local directory.

- raku-collection
    - local_raku_docs # this is generated by the git clone command
    - Website # this is generated by runnng 'Raku-Doc Init' in raku-collection
    config.raku # as Website

After the Init stage, calling Raku-Doc without any other options implies the mode Website with default options.

The Raku Documentation source files are regularly updated. The Website mode is configured to pull the latest versions of the source files into the Collection whenever Raku-Doc is run, which then updates the cache for any sources that have changed, and then re-render all the html files that are affected. These stages are automatically called by running Raku-Doc with the config defaults given.

The Website mode files and plugins are being actively developed, so newer versions may be available. New versions of the plugins are automatically called on each invocation of Raku-Doc. To get new versions of the Website mode files (sources and additional plugins), use

Raku-Doc Update

Raku-Doc can be called with other options, which are described in the Collection documentation.

Collection-Raku-Documentation is set up with the default mode called Website.

The more contemporary web design by Ogden Webb is in a mode call OgdenWebb. It is generated thus:

Raku-Doc OgdenWebb

It can be made the default by changing the mode key in the top-level config.raku file.

Raku-Doc as a wrapper for Collection::collect

With the exception of 'Init' and 'Update', Raku-Doc can be called with all the options listed for Collection::collect.

More information about these options is given in the Documentation for Collection.

More contemporary web site.

A more contemporary web design by Ogden Webb is now included. It is generated by running

Raku-Doc OgdenWebb

In the future (not now)

If Raku-Doc is called with a string other than 'Init' or 'Website', then the string is interpreted as another Mode, with its own sub-directory and Configuration for the collection. For example,

Raku-Doc Book

would create the collection output defined by the configuration in the sub-directory Book/config/. This design is to allow for the creation of different Collection outputs to be defined for the same content files.

Enabling Cro App

A Cro App is included that will run the website automatically by running Raku-Doc. The Cro App is called using a plugin that runs after the html files have been refreshed. The Cro App is called at completion (see Collection documentation). It contains a test to see if Cro::HTTP is installed.

Since installing Cro can cause testing problems, this distribution does not have Cro::HTTP as a dependency.

Cro in installed using zef as

zef install Cro::HTTP

Running Raku-Doc without options will now serve the documentation files locally on port 3000. So point your browser at localhost:3000

Highlighting

The default highlighter at present is a Node based toolstack called atom-perl-highlighter. In order to install it automatically, Raku::Pod::Render requires an uptodate version of npm. The builder is known not to work with node.js > ****v13.0> and npm > v14.15.

For someone who has not installed node or npm before, or for whom they are only needed for the highlighter, the installation is ... confusing. It would seem at the time of writing that the easiest method is:

# Using Ubuntu
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_14.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

Then, after the default installation of Raku::Pod::Render, highlighting can be enabled by running the following in a terminal:

raku-render-install-highlighter

Problems

Collection is still being actively developed.

When running Raku-Doc with a sources-refresh key set to a git pull stanza, Raku-Doc teminates after a git pull. Workaround: run Raku-Doc again.

Copyright and License

LICENSE Artistic-2.0

Rendered from README at 2023-01-14T10:19:05Z