ExDash

ExDash seamlessly integrates the docs in your local elixir projects with your Dash docs.

ExDash provides a mix task that rebuilds a Dash Docset for your local Elixir project.

mix docs.dash

The Dream

The Alfred + Dash integration for fast doc searching has become an integral part of our workflow at Urbint.

Once our app reached a certain size, we wanted to be able to search our own internal documentation as easily as the public Hex docs.

Being able to more easily dogfood these docs would only encourage us to improve them.

ExDash is a tool for closing that gap.

Installation

The package can be installed by adding ex_dash to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:ex_dash, "~> 0.1.0"},
  ]
end

Dependencies

Dash Docsets include a SQLite table, and as such, this task expects sqlite3 to be available.

brew install sqlite3

Usage

ExDash currently provides a mix task that rebuilds the docset for your local app.

mix docs.dash

From there, you can open that docset on your machine to refresh the Dash contents.

• TODO: flag for auto-opening
• TODO: flag for auto-moving it into the proper Dash folder if it exists already

A git-hook, perhaps?

If you'd like, you can auto-update your docs everytime you pull the latest from github.

TODO write githook

Under the hood

The goal was for the docs to be indistinguishable from the rest of Elixir documentation provided via Hex and Dash.

As such, this task builds the docs using ExDoc under the hood, and uses those pages as the source pages for showing the documentation.

Outside of that, Dash docsets rely on two things:

• a SQLite database for search
• Dash "anchors" injected into the docs pages, to populate the table of contents along the left side of Dash's view. Currently Functions, Types, Callbacks, and Macros are supported.

These are run in succession in ExDash.Formatter. See ExDash.Formatter.Docset and ExDash.Formatter.Injector for more.