Zeal: Install docsets from command line

[haslinger]

Is there a way to install docsets from the command line?
My usecase is writing an install script for automatic installation via bash script for creating a bootable USB-stick-based development environment for Rails Girls Events and similar courses.

P.S.: Zeal is awesome!

[trollixx]

Not at the moment. You could do it manually by downloading and unpacking
docsets, but there's no any CLI support for this task in Zeal yet.

[haslinger]

Thank you @trollixx for your support, perfect. It didn't know that it's that easy, unpacking the .tgz is enough.
I will probably have to cheat a little bit regarding the meta.json and icons, but besides that, it's working for me already!

[trollixx]

What we need here is a way to mass deploy Zeal settings and/or docsets. It's a quite interesting task, and might come handy in corporate or educational environments. Perhaps the first step would be an ability to dump and load docset lists. Either through UI, CLI-interface, or some other API.

Adding a reference to #400, because these two tasks seems related.

[petRUShka]

Plus one. It is very useful for some automated provision like spark for example.

I fork spark and try to create my own configuration which I can deploy to newly installed PC with several commands. It would be great to be allowed to install zeal docsets by command line in order to write my scriptable configuration.

[multun]

@haslinger Hey there :) I'm from another contest / event that also uses Zeal to provide documentation.
We created this project that you might find helpful => https://bitbucket.org/prologin/envlive/src

I would also be interested in having a command line interface to download docsets, as it is the only unautomated part of our build system.

Thank you :)

[trollixx]

More people want this, time to prioritise this feature higher I guess...

[jakoch]

E.g. a CLI command like zeal --download-docsets mysql, php, js, ts, node, whatnot to download docsets would help a lot. It would allow re-packaging Zeal with docsets included and enable immediate offline usage.

[trollixx]

@jakoch Nothing prevents you from repackaging Zeal with docsets right now, just make sure to use the proper docset location. Should be even easier with the portable version, since all configuration is stored in a single .ini file.

[jakoch]

Doesn't make sense to me =)
Because it means that i have to replicate the work you already did (in an outside packaging script):

• write a downloader for the docsets
• extract them into the right location
• configure them to be found (e.g. configure to work out-of-the-box)
• plus it adds more work: when you change config logic, i have to change the packaging script, etc.

[cweagans]

It would be great to be able to get my list of Zeal docsets into my dotfiles repo so that I can keep them in sync across my workstations!

[justinmk]

@cweagans Did you try https://github.com/sunaku/dasht/ ?

[ssokolow]

Unless dasht is guaranteed to be able to make the process of installing docsets for use via Zeal scriptable, it's not very useful.

I want to coninue using Zeal, but I also want to my docsets alongside the lines for apt-get and npm -g and the like in the ubuntu_setup.sh script I'm currently migrating to Ansible.

(Also, I instinctively recoil from any software repository that takes such an informal approach to communication that it sticks emoji in its page titles... and that's before you factor in my dislike for finding garish multi-colored glyphs in positions other than the favicon column in my Tree Style Tab sidebar.)

[cweagans]

@justinmk I did not. Looks interesting. I guess I could use that to pull down docsets into the right place, and then just use Zeal as a viewer? Probably wouldn't use the dasht CLI for actually searching docs though.

[ssokolow]

My concern there is that it wouldn't register the docsets with Zeal such that Zeal could check for updates.