Generating RDOCs for locally installed gems

Question

I am trying to contribute to a gem I recently took interest in - Nesta. The developer has done a great job in creating one of the lightest, thinest CMSs you can find and I want to document it. I have read through the code and commented on a few methods to the best of my knowledge.

However, I seek to test this out locally by calling gem server and seeing the changes on my machine before pushing it online.

Things I have tried:

1. Manual edit.
   • Documented the file.
   • Fired up gem server.
2. Using the gem tool.
   • Documented the file.
   • Ran gem rdoc nesta --rdoc
   • Restarted gem server

All to no avail. Please help.
Thank you.

Answer 1

Are you sure you've installed the version that you've modified, not the original version?

If you've installed the modified version, but have forgotten to install the rdoc, see Can you install documentation for existing gems?

Answer 2

You can preview generated html pages without installing a modified version of the gem on your machine. Add this to nesta's Rakefile:

require 'rake/rdoctask'
Rake::RDocTask.new('doc') do |i|
  i.rdoc_files = FileList['lib/**/*']
end

and type rake doc. Then view generated html/index.html file.