Manual pages(aka: man pages) are well known software documents for programs and libraries in the Unix platforms. This document describes how to create them for 2 binaries present in the bitshares-core project: witness_node and cli_wallet.
We already have available ./witness_node --help and ./cli_wallet --help. We are going to use this output to generate unix manual pages.
https://www.gnu.org/software/help2man/ is a tool for this purpose. To install it in Linux we do:
sudo apt install help2man
We have all needed to create a decent looking man page automatically inside the program folders of the 2 binaries. The .h2m are static files used to add some additional info to the output.
The command to create the manual page for the witness_node is the following:
help2man ./witness_node --include witness_node.h2m —no-info > witness_node.1
To see our creation we just do:
man ./witness_node.1
Similar to this we can do the same for the command line wallet binary:
help2man ./cli_wallet --include cli_wallet.h2m --no-info > cli_wallet.1
man ./cli_wallet.1
This should be done after each release and this file should be linked in the BitShares Git Flow process
Now that we have a manual page we can install another tool:
sudo apt install man2html-base
Once we have it we can use our man pages to generate html:
man2html ./witness_node.1 > witness_node.html
And for the cli wallet:
man2html ./cli_wallet.1 > cli_wallet.html
https://open-explorer.io/man/witness_node.html
https://open-explorer.io/man/cli_wallet.html
I dont have an official place for this files yet if we want to implement them