Local Documentation: PHP, Django, jQuery

Annika Backstrom

in Uncategorized, on 10 February 2009. Django Django documentation jquery PHP

As ubiquitous as wifi is these days, I still feel better with a local copy of the documentation around. Here's how I created local copies of the PHP, Django, and jQuery docs on my MacBook running Mac OS X 10.5.6.

Django

Django's documentation files are flat HTML, so the only real step is to build the docs using Sphinx. I'll do this in ~/Sites/django-docs/ for consistency with my PHP setup, but strictly speaking you can access these docs without the overhead of a web server.

sudo easy_install sphinx
cd ~/Sites/
svn co http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk/docs/ django-docs
cd django-docs
make html

The final step took several minutes to complete on my MacBook. Script output notes that the new documentation is stored in build/_html/. Open the index.html file in your browser. There's no step 3!

PHP

The PHP setup is slightly more complicated since the docs themselves rely on PHP. (On the upside, this provides quick access to function reference with URLs like php.net/explode.) Luckily the process is well documented. I won't duplicate their steps here, but I will share some tips.

Here is my Apache 2 configuration file. I saved this to /private/etc/apache2/other/php.localhost.conf where it's automatically included by /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf. Open up httpd.conf add the directive NameVirtualHost *.

Mac OS X 10.5 honors /etc/hosts, so appending something to the standard localhost line gives you a quick-and-easy local domain name. I used php.localhost:

127.0.0.1       localhost php.localhost

The initial takes a few minutes. I highly recommend using the suggested flags to ignore non-English language files and the documentation tarballs.

Finally, I had to disable the inclusion of httpd-manual.conf in httpd.conf, which was overriding http://php.localhost/manual/.

jQuery

Unfortunately, this results in a broken API browser for reasons unknown to me. I'll leave it here in case others figure out where I went wrong.

This one is pretty straightforward, but requires another VirtualHost as the URLs are all relative to /. Personally I like docs.jquery.com better than the API browser, but those docs run off a MediaWiki install. First, download the docs. (These are also available as an Adobe AIR application, linked from api.jquery.com.)

First, add a new alias to /etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1       localhost php.localhost jquery.localhost

Now download the API browser using Subversion. For some reason, jquery-1.3.1.js is missing from trunk, so we'll download that as well.

cd ~/Sites/
svn co http://jqueryjs.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/tools/jquery-api-browser/ jquery-docs
curl -o jquery-docs/lib/jquery/jquery-1.3.1.js http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.1/jquery.min.js

A very simple Apache configuration file is needed. I created other/jquery.localhost.conf, just like I did for the PHP docs:

<VirtualHost *>
    ServerName jquery.localhost
    DocumentRoot /Users/adam/Sites/jquery-docs
    DirectoryIndex index.php
</VirtualHost>

Restart Apache (sudo apachectl restart) and browse to http://jquery.localhost/. Docs!