Week 6: Search index and distribution

This is a third progress report for a command line tool called “Posh TUI”. It’s an API documentation browser —like Dash, but for your console.

Software is not yeat available, but there is a limited pre-sale for a lifetime license. It includes all future updates for free, but also I’ll be closely listening to feedback and will be building future roadmap based on it.

Recap

Previously I have explained, that project consists of two big parts that need to work together.

• Documentation generation and hosting
• TUI app that would allow to review/search documentation

Since I’m unable to render html in console, documentation have to come in form of Markdown. Two weeks ago, I embarked on a journey to build RDoc plugin to generate markdown documentation for Ruby and libraries.

Progress report

RDoc-markdown gem

I’m excited to report, that I completed rdoc-markdown gem. Version 0.3 of this library produces not only markdown files, but also search index file. It probably still has some quirks that would need fixing, but this is already enough for me to move forward and build a TUI client.

Since plugin was built as open source, I made sure that it’s easy to approach for collaborators. Don’t be shy and take a peak! I’m always open to feedback.

While working on TUI client, I’ll be showing off this plugin in different ruby communities. This may yield some great improvements and feedback or will just pass unnoticed.

Docsets delivery

Another part of puzzle is how to deliver docsets, to smplify things I decided to just distribute all docsets as one archive. Docsets includes only ruby language and Ruby on Rails frameworks that did not reach end of life. In terms of size, that’s not a big package to download.

This delivery mechanism will not scale well with more docsets. But I guess that will be a good problem to have later. For now, I can just skip all of it.

I have packaged 3 latest Rails release and 3 latest Ruby releases. And currently using those for local tests.

I did apply for Free AWS credits as a startup founder and got approved within 2 days. Now I’ll have credits to distribute these free of charge for myself. Thank you, Amazon.

What’s next?

At this stage, most of the “back office” things are finished, and I’m ready to work on a client facing TUI app. My goal for next 2 weeks would be to deliver first prototype to existing customers.

It might not do much, but it should already be possible to play around with it and have a reliable delivery mechanism where people can validate their licenses and update their software.

Off I go to work on most exciting part of this project!