Comment 1:

This is being worked on, kinda.
Now that godoc can run on App Engine, we'll be doing something like running different
subdomains of golang.org for old releases.
Andrew knows the details.

Owner changed to @adg.

Status changed to Accepted.

Comment 2:

To generate static docs, just run this command:
godoc -http=localhost:8080 &
wget -r -np http://localhost:8080/pkg/
We're working on providing online docs for older versions of Go.

Comment 3:

I haven't thought about using wget. Nice. For those interested in this trick, here are
some notes.
First, edit robots.txt in the go root directory, and remove "Disallow: /". Otherwise
only the index will be downloaded because wget respects robots.txt.
Then start godoc pointing to the project path:
godoc -path="/path/to/project" -http=:8080
And finally this a more complete command to get a working static docs, including static
files and with proper links:
wget -r -np -N -E -p -k http://localhost:8080/pkg/
-r  : download recursive
-np : don't ascend to the parent directory
-N  : don't retrieve files unless newer than local
-E  : add extension .html to html files (if they don't have)
-p  : download all necessary files for each page (css, js, images)
-k  : convert links to relative

Comment 4:

Labels changed: added priority-later.

Comment 5:

Owner changed to ---.

Status changed to HelpWanted.

Comment 7:

Labels changed: added godoc.

Comment 8 by pedromorgan:

Yes please

Comment 9:

You can ask wget to ignore robots.txt by adding the flag `-e robots=off`.

Comment 10:

Labels changed: added go1.3maybe.

Comment 11:

Labels changed: added release-none, removed go1.3maybe.

Comment 12:

Labels changed: added repo-tools.

I would also like godoc to be able to generate static docs. The proposed workaround (hosting all the files and wgeting it) works but it crawls the entire contents of your GOPATH, which is less than ideal because that then bloats the static docs incredibly.

I still want things like the builtins to link correctly to docs, so some incantation of go list to pull out the dependencies of the project would be ideal. Unfortunately, I can't just write a bash script to do this because using godoc -html path/to/package just returns the raw HTML without any CSS, and no JS to handle section expansion.

EDIT: Managed to do this in the end with a fairly noddy script.

Change https://golang.org/cl/72890 mentions this issue: godoc/internal/render: add render package for text formatting

As part of my work on #18342, I wrote simple static generator for godoc, that I realized is really well suited for resolving this issue. Is there any interest in including it's generated output in each release?

You can see statically generated docs at: https://static-hotlinks.digitalstatic.net/

As part of my work on #18342, I wrote simple static generator for godoc, that I realized is really well suited for resolving this issue. Is there any interest in including it's generated output in each release?

@dsnet Is this static generator available somewhere? I'd like to give it a try for hosting docs for a few packages.

For the record, I went with Cheney's godoc2md tool: https://github.com/davecheney/godoc2md and it works perfectly. I feed the resulting markdown files into a static site generator like Hugo.

I'd like to second supporting a static output of go doc without having to use other external tools like wget. I feel like https://github.com/davecheney/godoc2md solves this fairly well, but that tool is no longer being supported. I'd recommend adding markdown output to the go doc command.

The use case is fairly simple. When working on private packages or modules that can't be made public, it's nice to just bundle the docs in the repo as a README.md.

As user, I'd like to express how "lost" I feel to generate a directory containing self contained documentation of a go project and not using any server or service. I've found many pointers and I might not be that informed, but having a multi language project where "the other guys" produce some "nice" javadoc contained in one directory; I'm lost to do that easily with go/go doc/godoc/... just my 2cents.

@marcellanz I agree, there doesn't exist a user friendly way of doing this yet. This issue is open and tracking resolving that task.

As a brief update, there has been progress made on relevant components that will enable resolving this issue. So it is moving along.

@dmitshur thanks for the update. sounds good.

@dmitshur this would be a great feature. Is there a timeline of when this would be rolled out?

It's not known when this issue will be complete. When there are updates, they'll be posted on this issue.

I want to add my two cents that I am currently wrapping up my first go library after being a python developer for 5 or so years, and the lack of easy static docs has me a little lost as well. Streamlined documentation is so important for team projects, and using godoc.org isn't a viable option for many in-house projects.

My use case: We already host most of our docs on readthdocs.org in a private repo. If i had a way of generating a static html file for my projects, then I might be able to upload them to their own page and keep our docs all in one place.

Any update on this or any external library currently able to do this. I need to host go documentation on private Gitlab. Thanks

I wrote a small prototype that can output static html: https://github.com/netlify/godoc-static
(not in any way complete, will try to write a blog post on it soon)

@dmitshur : Is someone actively working on this? Is there a public discussion or collection of PRs that we can follow to get a better sense of the progress and perhaps where we could pitch in?

I have workaround that using the wget command for that. Example: snippet

I have a similar issue with that. I'm using GitLab for my projects and I have decide to create and share with some handy GitLab CI YAML templates for Go projects that will automatically generate a static HTML Go documentation from the godoc tool without any external packages: https://gitlab.com/tymonx/gitlab-ci

Example: Go Logger documentation

Two nice features:

• Embedded Go source code files
• Search box is referencing to GitLab

I'm also waiting for this feature :)

Folks Its been 10 years can I ask if there is progress in this feature? 1 use case is if we get static docs we can host the project godocs at enterprise level.

I've created a tool gopages based on the suggestions outlined here. Perhaps that may be useful for those generating internal enterprise docs for static sites.

A built-in solution would be excellent, nonetheless.

Wow @JohnStarich, beat me by 6 hours. I've created a similar tool that only outputs docs for direct dependencies here :) https://github.com/viamrobotics/govanity

For the record, that old Gerrit CL of mine has been partially mirrored over to https://github.com/dsnet/godoc. My original intention for that repo is to serve as a testing bed for various godoc proposals (e.g., #7873, #25444, #44447, #45533). If others want to use it to statically generate godoc pages, then they are free to do so.

This is really annoying, especially because the anchors of links to source files are too the wrong line number... which is normally not recognized because godoc uses javascript to jump to the line too.

you can generate with Doc2Go:

https://github.com/abhinav/doc2go

it also supports generating different versions of a module