Extract and render manuals from Debian packages
Project description
debmans is a tool to extract documentation (currently manpages) from Debian packages and transform them into HTML for viewing with a normal web browser.
This suite of tools is designed to run on manpages.debian.org, manpages.ubuntu.com, linux.die.net or similar services.
Example
You can do a test run of this software against your local APT cache, like this:
$ ( cd /var/cache/apt/archives/ && dpkg-scanpackages . | sudo tee Packages > /dev/null ) dpkg-scanpackages: warning: package tar (filename ./tar_1.27.1-2+b1_amd64.deb) is repeat; dpkg-scanpackages: warning: ignored that one and using data from ./tar_1.27.1-2+deb8u1_amd64.deb! $ debmans -m /var/cache/apt/archives -o html -v --progress extract render site serve extracting files matching patterns: (u'man/(?:\\w+/)?man[1-9]/.+\\.[1-9]\\w*(?:\\.gz)?$',) in mirror /var/cache/apt/archives extracting packages [####################################] 100% completed inspection of 564 packages, extracted 559 files received 559 paths from extractor rendering manpages [#################################---] 92% 0d 00:00:02man2html: unable to open or read file man1/dmenu.1 rendering manpages [####################################] 100% looking for static files to render in *.mdwn Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8000...
Your rendered manpages will be available at <http://localhost:8000/>.
Note that you will need dpkg-scanpackages from the dpkg-dev package to run the above test. The warnings can be safely ignored. debmans doesn’t normally require dpkg-dev in operation if you use a properly configured mirror.
Common tasks
A more normal run would be to run on a regular mirror. This will extract all manpages from the given mirror and convert to HTML:
debmans --mirror /srv/mirror --output static extract render
This can be ran repeatedly and only extracted manpages will be rendered.
Extraction only
You can also run the process step by step, for example, this will only extract the manpages:
debmans -m /srv/mirror -o html extract
Note that extract creates a cache in the output directory to avoid re-extracting already found archives. Render also uses a caching mechanism by not converting to HTML if the HTML version is newer than the manpage. Those mechanisms can be disabled with --no-cache.
debmans -m /srv/mirror -o html --no-cache extract
You can make a trial run with the -n flag and enable more verbose logging:
debmans -v -n -m /srv/mirror -o manpages extract
Rendering only
Rendering the pages can be done separately with:
debmans -o html render --srcdir manpages
This is especially important if the extraction process was interrupted, as only part of the manpages will be rendered on subsequent runs.
Manpages are currently rendered with man2html but this can be changed with the -r flag, although no other renderer has been tested and the output may not be compatible with man2html.
Static pages rendering
The templating engine is fairly simple, based on Jinja2, which uses standard {{foo}} placeholders. The template is in static/template.html and should be following debian.org’s graphic design conventions.
This should generate the markdown files:
debmans -o html site
Use --prefix if the directory is not at the root of the host.
Installation
debmans can be installed through pip with:
pip install debmans
Source code can also be found on Gitlab with Git or as a tarball, or on Debian’s collab-maint repository.
The source code is should be installed with:
./setup.py install
It can also be ran from the source tree directly with:
python -m debmans render
The dependencies are listed in the setup.py file.
Acknowledgements
debmans was written by Antoine Beaupré and is licensed under the Affero GPLv3, see license for the complete license.
Parts of this software were inspired by a review of existing tools, most notably the Ubuntu manpages converter and dgilman’s converter. The sources.debian.net service source code and design was also directly used in some parts, which is partly why debmans is licensed under the AGPL.
Also thanks to Paul Wise for nudging me along and all the help navigating the various tools and protocols to make all this work.
This project mostly follows the Core Infrastructure best practices, see the full report for details.
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