Paul Gillard

I can run gem server and get the documentation for all my gems served at http://localhost:8808. Very handy indeed and something I always have to hand when coding. I access the Ruby documentation more than anything else and, although the online docs are fine, it's not too useful when I'm offline! It'd be nice if I could get them served locally huh? Below are instructions for doing just that for my version of Ruby. Read on...

At the command line type ruby -v to get the version and patch level of the Ruby version you're running.
Go to http://svn.ruby-lang.org/repos/ruby/tags and find the path to the revision of the Ruby source that you're running. For me that'd be http://svn.ruby-lang.org/repos/ruby/tags/v1_8_6_111.
Go get Subversion if you don't already have it.
Get a local copy of the Ruby source for that version. To do so I ran svn export http://svn.ruby-lang.org/repos/ruby/tags/v1_8_6_111/ at the command line. Note I'm exporting (export) rather than checking out (co) as I'm not going to need to commit changes back again.
Jump into the root folder of the newly created directory structure (for me this was v1_8_6_111) and run rdoc -o c:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\doc\ruby-1.8.6.111. The -o flag tells rdoc where to put the generated documentation (amend as necessary).
Jump into 'c:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\specifications' and create a new file named 'ruby-1.8.6.111.gemspec' with the following content:
```
# -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-

Gem::Specification.new do |s|
  s.name = 'ruby'
  s.version = '1.8.6.111'
  s.homepage = 'http://www.ruby-lang.org'
  s.summary = 'The Ruby documentation'
end
```
When the gem server initialises it searches this folder for gem specifications. Having this file here causes the code to display a link to our Ruby documentation

This means that by going to http://localhost:8808 when the gem server is running I'm able to view the Ruby documentation along with all my gems.

Nice.

Offline Ruby Documentation 1

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