I used to keep rdoc and ri turned off to speed up gem installs via my .gemrc config. This became problematic recently when I was planning on doing some work while traveling, and knew I wouldn’t have an always on internet connection to get my documentation fix. I recalled a post by Jason Seifer I had seen that described how to generate your docs with a better template and host them as a passenger application. I decided to use that as a starting point to getting my docs generated in a format I liked and setting things up so that they would always be generated that way.

Jason’s instructions tell us to install the “hanna” template via `gem install mislav-hanna` which is out of date, so we will use the most current instructions from the gems github page to install the template. No big deal, just drop the github username from the gem install command like this…

The “hanna” template absolutely kills the default rdoc template. You’ve probably seen it around being used by various projects and there’s no reason not to use it locally.

Next I updated my .gemrc to ignore ri and to use the “hanna” template for rdocs.

Finally I re-generated my rdocs by running:

I ignored the rest of the steps in the aforementioned post as I don’t really feel the need to be running a passenger instance just to serve rubygems docs. I generally just run `gem server` whenever I need to access my local docs.

My solution is barely more than what you get out of the box with rubygems but with just a few changes I find myself much happier with my local docs.