Nginx.conf(5) man page

Server NGINX
1

Hi,
OpenBSD is working on replacing the (heavily patched) apache 1.3 in
base with nginx. During that work the question was raised if we can
have a nginx.conf(5) man page.
As a proof of concept I put a perl script together which scrapes the
pages on nginx documentation (below “Modules reference”) and
generates a mdoc(7) file.

  • what’s the license of the documentation?
  • is the documentation on nginx documentation generated from some
    sort of source file? Parsing the html works reasonably well but is not
    optimal.
  • would there be interest to include a man page into the distribution
    once it’s ready?
    Thanks,
    Florian
    –
    I’m not entirely sure you are real.
2

Hi Florian.

On 9/24/13 6:24 PM, Florian Obser wrote:

Hi,
OpenBSD is working on replacing the (heavily patched) apache 1.3 in
base with nginx. During that work the question was raised if we can
have a nginx.conf(5) man page.

Nice to hear.

As a proof of concept I put a perl script together which scrapes the
pages on nginx documentation (below “Modules reference”) and
generates a mdoc(7) file.

  • what’s the license of the documentation?

It’s under the same license as the whole nginx distribution:

http://nginx.org/LICENSE

  • is the documentation on nginx documentation generated from some
    sort of source file? Parsing the html works reasonably well but is not
    optimal.

It is generated from xml files. The whole nginx.org repository is
public (see “Source Code” section):

http://nginx.org/en/download.html

Also, you can explore it online:

http://trac.nginx.org/nginx/browser/nginx_org

Please note that nginx documentation has documentation
for nginx f/oss and nginx-plus, our commercial product under
commercial license.

The features available in nginx-plus only have an appropriate note
in the documentation.

  • would there be interest to include a man page into the distribution
    once it’s ready?

I think it’s a good idea while we manage to keep a single source for
both nginx.org docs and man page.

–
Maxim K.

3

Hello!

On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 06:35:32PM +0400, Maxim K. wrote:

[…]

  • would there be interest to include a man page into the distribution
    once it’s ready?

I think it’s a good idea while we manage to keep a single source for
both nginx.org docs and man page.

I actually don’t think it’s a good idea. We intentionally
have the documentation separated from the source code - it allows
to do releases and documentation editing/updating separately (and
this happens often). A separate distribution for a manpage might
be a better idea.

–
Maxim D.
http://nginx.org/en/donation.html

4

Hello!

On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 06:45:50PM +0400, Maxim K. wrote:

I think it’s a good idea while we manage to keep a single source for
both nginx.org docs and man page.

I actually don’t think it’s a good idea. We intentionally
have the documentation separated from the source code - it allows
to do releases and documentation editing/updating separately (and
this happens often). A separate distribution for a manpage might
be a better idea.

Ability to generate man page from xml files doesn’t hurt.

Sure, as part of the nginx.org repository. But I believe the
original question was about including the resulting nginx.conf(5)
manpage into nginx distribution, which intentionally doesn’t
include documentation (except minimal nginx(8) manpage).

–
Maxim D.
http://nginx.org/en/donation.html

5

On 9/24/13 6:44 PM, Maxim D. wrote:

both nginx.org docs and man page.

I actually don’t think it’s a good idea. We intentionally
have the documentation separated from the source code - it allows
to do releases and documentation editing/updating separately (and
this happens often). A separate distribution for a manpage might
be a better idea.

Ability to generate man page from xml files doesn’t hurt.

–
Maxim K.