Ubuntu Manpage: dwww - access documentation via WWW

NAME

       dwww - access documentation via WWW

SYNOPSIS

       http://localhost/dwww/index.html

DESCRIPTION

       A  typical Linux system has documentation in many formats (manual pages, Info files, READMEs, and so on).
       dwww makes it possible to access all of these via the same interface,  a  WWW  browser.   This  makes  it
       easier to use the documentation.

       dwww consists of several programs:

       cgi-bin/dwww
              Run  by  the  WWW  server  when  user  requests  document  via  dwww.  Parses the request and runs
              dwww-convert(8) or dwww-find(8) with  suitable  arguments.   Installed  in  the  server's  cgi-bin
              directory.

       dwww-convert(8)
              Converts any document to HTML.

       dwww-format-man(8)
              Auxiliary program to convert man pages or text files to HTML.

       dwww-find(8)
              Searches for documentation.

       dwww-quickfind(8)
              Used by dwww-find(8) to quickly find which package a program belongs to.

       dwww-cache(8)
              Manages the cache of converted documents.

       dwww-refresh-cache(8)
              Cleans outdated documents from the cache.

       dwww-build(8)
              Builds  static  lists  of  manual  pages.   Needs to be re-run whenever documents are installed or
              removed.  (In default configuration is called by the dwww daily cron job).

       dwww-build-menu(8)
              Builds the Debian Documentation Menu pages.  Needs to be re-run whenever documents  are  installed
              or removed.  (In default configuration is called by the install-docs(8) or by the dwww daily  cron
              job).

       dwww-index++(8)
              Uses  index++(1)  to  build  index  of  the  documentation  registered  with doc-base.  In default
              configuration is called be the dwww weekly cron job.

       For speed reasons, the converted documents are stored  in  /var/cache/dwww.   The  cache  is  cleaned  by
       dwww-refresh-cache(8) of old documents to keep it from growing too large.

CONFIGURATION

dwww is configured via the /etc/dwww/dwww.conf file. That file is a Bourne shell (/bin/sh) script that
defines some or all the following variables (defaults are used if the file doesn't exist, or doesn't
define the variable).

Basic configuration variables
These variables can be also configured by debconf script. You can change them using the following
command:
dpkg-reconfigure dwww

DWWW_SERVERNAME
Name of the www server. Default is localhost.

DWWW_SERVERPORT
Port on which the www server listen to. Default is 80.

DWWW_USEHTTPS
If enabled, dwww(1) will connect to DWWW_SERVERNAME:DWWW_SERVERPORT through the HTTPS protocol.
Default is no.

DWWW_DOCROOTDIR
The document root for web server. Default is /var/www.

DWWW_CGIDIR
The directory which contains the CGI scripts for your web server. Default is /usr/lib/cgi-bin.

DWWW_CGIUSER
Name of the user that the web server uses to execute CGI scripts. Default is www-data.

Browser variables
DWWW_BROWSER
Web-browser used by dwww(1) to load dwww main page.

DWWW_X11_BROWSER
Web-browser used by dwww(1) to load dwww main page when in X11.

Path variables
DWWW_DOCPATH
Colon-delimited list of directories from which dwww-convert(8) supplies files. For security
reasons, it will refuse to convert files outside the directories named by this variable. Default
is /usr/share/doc:/usr/share/info:/usr/share/man:/usr/local/share/doc:/usr/local/share/info
:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/share/common-licenses.

DWWW_ALLOWEDLINKPATH
Colon-delimited list of directories which can be targets of symlinks from files from directories
inside DWWW_DOCPATH. Default value is /usr/share:/usr/lib:/usr/local/share:/var/www.
For example, /usr/share/doc/package/foo.html may be symlinked to a file
/usr/share/package/foo.html, and this file can be displayed by dwww.

Cache files locations
DWWW_QUICKFIND_DB
Location of the installed packages and programs cache file, generated by dwww-refresh-cache(8)
with the help of dwww-quickfind(8). Default is /var/cache/dwww/quickfind.dat.

DWWW_DOCBASE2PKG_DB
Location of the cache file, which maps installed doc-base files to packages names, used by the
dwww-build-menu(8). Default is /var/cache/dwww/docbase2pkg.dat.

DWWW_REGDOCS_DB
Location of doc-base registered documents contents cache. The cache is generated by
dwww-build-menu(8) and read by dwww-find(8) Default is /var/cache/dwww/regdocs.dat.

Documentation indexing variables
DWWW_INDEX_DOCUMENTATION
If this variable is set to yes (default), and the swish++ package is installed, then
dwww-index++(8) will generate index of registered documentation.

DWWW_INDEX_FULL_SLEEP_TIME
In order to not impede regular server operation, dwww-index++(8) sleeps for the specified amount
of time (in seconds) before feeding the next file path to index to index++(1). The default value
is 0.15.

DWWW_INDEX_FULL_TIME_INTERVAL
Specifies how often (in days) dwww-index++(8) will generate full index of documentation. The
default value is 28.

DWWW_INDEX_INCREMENTAL_TIME_INTERVAL
Specifies how often (in days) dwww-index++(8) will run incremental indexing of new documentation
files. The default value is 7.

DWWW_MERGE_MAN2HTML_INDEX
If this variable is set to yes, then while generating index of registered documents,
dwww-index++(8) will use man pages index generated by man2html package, if it's available.

Other variables
DWWW_KEEPDAYS
How many days should dwww-refresh-cache(8) keep documents that have not been accessed? Default is
10 days.

DWWW_TMPDIR
Directory used by dwww-build(8) and dwww-build-menu(8) to temporally store the web pages it
generates. Default is /var/lib/dwww. For security reason any public writable directory like /tmp
should not be used.

DWWW_USEFILEURL
If this variable is set, dwww will use file:/ style URLs to access html files - bypassing the CGI
script. This is faster on slow machines. Of course, you will not be able to read the html
documentation on a non-local machine. Default is to not enable this feature.

DWWW_TITLE
Title to appear on dwww generated files. Default is dwww: $(hostname)

DWWW_USE_CACHE
If this variable is set to yes (default), dwww will cache accessed documents in
/var/cache/dwww/db. See dwww-cache(8).

Deprecated variables
Since version 1.10, dwww no longer uses the following variables: DWWW_HTMLDIR, DWWW_MAN2HTML,
DWWW_TEXT2HTML, DWWW_DIR2HTML.

CUSTOMISING DWWW PAGES LAYOUT

       dwww uses a CSS file for managing the layout of the pages it generates. The file is built from two  other
       files,   namely   /usr/share/dwww/dwww.css,  which  is  a  global  one,  provided  by  the  package,  and
       /etc/dwww/dwww-user.css, a local one, that can be provided by the user  to  override  settings  from  the
       former  file.   The  latter file does not exist by default, but when it exists, dwww-build(8) will append
       its contents at the end of generated file.  Since web browsers tend to use the last one  setting  defined
       for a given CSS element, this has the expected effect of customisation.

   Example
       To   use   some   image   as   a   background   for  dwww  pages,  please  put  something  like  this  in
       /etc/dwww/dwww-user.css:

           body { background: url('http://host/path/to/background.png')
                  repeat; }
           table,pre,code,tt { opacity: 0.7; }

       Please make sure to run dwww-build(8) afterwards.

FILES

       /etc/dwww/dwww.conf
              Configuration file for dwww.  It's not necessary for  this  file  to  exist,  there  are  sensible
              defaults for everything.

       /etc/dwww/apache.conf
              Default  configuration  file  for  various  apache-based  web  servers.   The  dwww  package post-
              installation script creates symlinks from /etc/apache*/conf.d/dwww to this file.

       /etc/dwww/dwww-user.css
              If such a file exists, its contents will be appended to the  dwww.css  file.   This  allows  local
              administrators to customise dwww pages layout.

       /etc/cron.daily/dwww
              Dwww daily cron job, which rebuilds cache directory and dwww HTML pages.

       /etc/cron.weekly/dwww
              Dwww weekly cron job. Uses dwww-index++(8) to rebuild registered documentation index.

       /var/cache/dwww
              Directory, where are placed various cache files generated and used by dwww.

       /var/cache/dwww/db
              Cache for the converted documents.

       /usr/share/dwww
              Templates for the dwww web pages (used by dwww-build(8) and others).

       /var/lib/dwww
              The dwww pages.  The server's document root directory should have a link to this directory.

AUTHOR

       Originally by Lars Wirzenius <liw@iki.fi>.  Modified by Jim Pick  <jim@jimpick.com>  and  Robert  Luberda
       <robert@debian.org>.   Bugs  should  be  reported  via  the  normal  Debian  bug  reporting  system,  see
       /usr/share/doc/debian/bug-reporting.txt file or reportbug(1) man page.

       dwww is licensed via the GNU General Public License.  While it has been written for Debian, porting it to
       other systems is strongly encouraged.

dwww 1.13.5                                    November 2nd, 2019                                        DWWW(7)