ArchWiki CLI 📖

A CLI tool to read pages from the ArchWiki

Table of contents

• Installation
  • crates.io
  • Source
• Usage
  • Reading Pages
    • Basic request
    • Using a different format
    • Caching
    • 404 page not found (-̥̥̥n-̥̥̥ )
  • Downloading page info
    • Updating everything
    • Updating a specific category
  • Listing pages and categories
  • File locations
    • The page file
    • Page cache files

Installation

Currently, you can only install this tool from crates.io or build it from source.

After you are finished with the installation you should run update-all.

crates.io

cargo install archwiki-rs

Source

git clone https://github.com/jackboxx/archwiki-rs
cd archwiki-rs
cargo build --release
cp ./target/release/archwiki-rs $SOME_DIRECTORY_IN_YOUR_PATH # e.g. $HOME/.cargo/bin

Usage

Reading Pages

Basic request

archwiki-rs read-page Neovim

Using a different format

archwiki-rs read-page Neovim --format markdown

Caching

By default, pages are cached in the file system after they are fetched and subsequent request for that page then use that cache. The cache is invalidated if the cache file hasn't been updated in the last 14 days.

404 page not found (-̥̥̥n-̥̥̥ )

If the page you are searching for doesn't exist, a list of the pages that are most similar (in name) to the page you asked for will be output instead of the page content. The categories are stored locally and can be fetched with the update-all command.

archwiki-rs read-page Neovi

# output
Neovim
...

Unlike the output when the page name does exist, this output is written to stderr instead of stdout. If you want to, you can create a program that checks if no page was found and uses stderr to give the user suggestions on what they might have wanted to type.

An example shell script to do something like this is available in the repository under the name example.sh.

Downloading page info

The page names used for suggestions are stored locally to prevent having to scrape the entire table of contents of the ArchWiki with every command

Updating everything

archwiki-rs update-all

Be warned, since this scrapes multiple thousand links, this is very slow (-, - )…zzzZZ

Updating a specific category

archwiki-rs update-category Xorg_commands

Listing pages and categories

archwiki-rs list-pages

This is output a styled tree of categories and pages but if you need an easily parseable list for a different program to use, you can use the -f flag to flatten the output into a newline separated list that only contains the names of all pages

archwiki-rs list-pages -f

File locations

All file paths use the the directories crate

The page file

See data_local_dir for more information.

Page cache files

See cache_dir for more information.