Accessing your cached javadoc offline

A few weeks ago I was on a plane and really wanted a way to access the javadocs for some of the libraries I was currently using. I had everything I needed, it was all right there in my maven cache but I didn’t have a convenient way to navigate through the documents. My quick fix at that point was to extract the javadoc jar and point my browser to the files. This quickly became a pain when I needed to start looking at other libraries’ documents. So, like any lazy engineer, I wrote a simple program to handle all this for me.

What follows is a simple python script that uses the built-in python web server and the zip utilities to read javadocs directly out of the javadoc jar in your maven repository.

https://gist.github.com/mgodave/5406999

This script is simple (and ugly) so expect to edit the code if you need different configuration.

To use it run

python javadoc.py

You can then hit an index of all cached artifacts with a javadoc jar at http://localhost:8080/m2/ (don’t forget the trailing slash) or the specific artifact at http://localhost:8080/m2/groupId/artifactId/version/index.html | path_to_file

TODO:

• It’s ugly, badly written python. fix it
• Support ivy/gradle caches
• Read the pom.xml/ivy.xml instead of path inference
• Use a web framework instead of manual path parsing