Local Documentation

Purpose

I like the idea of self hosting and having things accessible even when the internet goes down. Recently I stumbled upon the YouTuber @bashbunni and in one of her videos she mentioned how https://devdocs.io is something you can self host. That piqued my interest to say the least and I decided to do the same myself. This might be the shortest writeup I’ll ever do, but it’s still worth having I think.

Self Host devdocs.io

So, the easiest way I think to self host devdocs.io is to use docker-compose. I won’t go into detail how to set it up, but this is the docker-compose.yml I created for this:

services:
  devdocs:
    image: ghcr.io/freecodecamp/devdocs:latest
    ports:
      - 9292:9292

Very tiny indeed. I don’t have much more to say, other than this is fantastic.

Self host cheat.sh

Another nice to have is to self host cheat.sh. These are the steps I took to make that happen:

clone https://github.com/chubin/cheat.sh/
Bump alpine to 3.18 in Dockerfile
run docker-compose up -d

Now, the cool thing about cheat.sh is that the output looks nice even when you curl, so doing curl localhost:8002/echo gives you the output in the terminal. Nifty!

And the last thing I did was to add a function in my .zshrc:

function cheat() {
    curl localhost:8002/$@
}

So now when I run cheat echo this is the output:

# echo
# Print given arguments.
# See also: `printf`.
# More information: <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/echo-invocation.html>.

# Print a text message. Note: Quotes are optional:
echo "Hello World"

# Print a message with environment variables:
echo "My path is $PATH"

# Print a message without the trailing newline:
echo -n "Hello World"

# Append a message to the file:
echo "Hello World" >> file.txt

# Enable interpretation of backslash escapes (special characters):
echo -e "Column 1\tColumn 2"

# Print the exit status of the last executed command (Note: In Windows Command Prompt and PowerShell the equivalent commands are `echo %errorlevel%` and `$lastexitcode` respectively):
echo $?

# Pass text to another program through `stdin`:
echo "Hello World" | program

Nifty huh?