Generate documentation on commit

Question

What is the best practice for automatically-generating ruby documentation as part of a git commit workflow? We'd like to automatically generate new documentation whenever a commit is merged into master.

Answer 1

Use Git hooks.

If you want it to run on the client side, use a post-commit hook. Essentially, registering a hook (by storing it in .git/hooks) makes Git call an arbitrary script you provide after each successful git commit. Your script can then call RDoc or YARD to generate docs into some output directory (outside your source code repository, of course).

Alternatively, you can have it run on the server hosting your Git repo, using a post-receive hook. This will run after you push to the server's repo. For example, you could use this to automatically upload the new docs to /docs/dev/ on your project's web server.

For detailed instructions, see the chapter on hooks in the Git manual.