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Can't download pre-built documentation for offline use #66382

Description

@allan-bonadio

Affected URL(s)

https://nodejs.org/download/docs

Description of the problem

Thank you for a wonderful js interpreter! I use it all the time. It's a real sport, very reliable.

I usually download documentation for software I use a lot, so I have local copies, that I can use without an internet connection. Because, i'm often without an internet connection. But for Node, I couldn't find any pre-built. I've been working on this for about a week, off and on. I've got about a decade of experience on each of javascript, C++ and PHP, plus years of experience in about a dozen other languages. This is what I've tried; each is a disappointment.


A - I scoured node.org online. Nowhere on your site could I find a doc download. Now, I know you have the documentation tree somewhere, for the website. I'd be thrilled for just a .zip or .tgz of your doc directory, but I couldn't find anything.


B - Somehow I was lead to the page https://nodejs.org/download/docs , which is a page with links labeled with version numbers, almost all of which are dead links. I did find some docs for versions 0.5.0 and below, but those are very old.


C - Your single-page doc, https://nodejs.org/docs/latest-v24.x/api/all.html , is unusable offline. All link are hardwired, and point online.


D - Finally I downloaded all the source for Node, 1.1 gigabytes. I used 'make docserve' to serve it. But, the server is a black box, and I don't know what parts of the 1.1 gigabytes I can get rid of without breaking it. It is usable, but very awkward. I have no idea how to change the port number, for instance, and about half the webserver examples everywhere for anything use port 8000.

It did generate a hierarchy in the 'out' directory, with the HTML files for all the documentation, but when I throw the HTML files into the browser, there's some CSS problem. For instance, all the tiny svg icons are huge, the entire width of the page. There's no convenient sidebar; it's all stuck at the top of the page.


E - I tried 'make docopen', but, after a long log, it said

...
[05:57:37.975] DEBUG (parallel): Distributing 1 items across 1 chunks {"generator":"html","chunks":1,"chunkSize":10,"threads":4}
[05:57:50.449] DEBUG (parallel): Chunk 1/1 completed {"generator":"html"}
[05:57:50.449] DEBUG (html): Wrote 1/1 pages
[05:57:50.507] DEBUG (generators): Completed "html"
[05:57:50.507] DEBUG (caching): Evicted "@doc-kit/generator-react/html" after final consumer
0:63: execution error: File some object wasn’t found. (-43)

Then, it opened a browser window to an error message that the page couldn't be found. I'm using a MacBook Pro, 2.6ghz 6-core intel with 16gb ram, running Sonoma 14.8.5


Look, I just want an HTML tree, already built. Simple. Can't you just make a download for that?

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