Generate a local documentation for PCL

For practical reasons you might want to have a local documentation which corresponds to your PCL version. In this tutorial you will learn how to generate it and how to set up Apache so that the search bar works.

This tutorial was written for Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04, feel free to edit it on GitHub to add your platform.

Dependencies

You need to install a few dependencies in order to be able to generate the documentation:

$ sudo apt-get install doxygen graphviz sphinx3 python-pip
$ sudo pip install sphinxcontrib-doxylink

Generate the documentation

Go into the build folder of PCL where you’ve configured it (see tutorial) and enter:

$ make doc

Then you can open the documentation with your browser, for example:

$ firefox doc/doxygen/html/index.html

The documentation has been generated in your PCL build directory but it is not installed; if you wish to install it just do:

$ sudo make install

The default PCL CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX is /usr/local, this means the documentation will be located in /usr/local/share/doc/pcl-1.7/html/index.html

Note

You will quickly notice that the search bar doesn’t work! (searching opens “search.php” instead of searching)

Installing and configuring Apache

Apache (The Apache HTTP Server) is a web server application, in this section you will learn how to configure Apache in order to be able to use the search feature within your offline documentation.

First you need to install Apache and php:

$ sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 libapache2-mod-php5

Then you need to edit the default website location:

$ sudo gedit /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf

Change DocumentRoot (default = /var/www/html) to /usr/local/share/doc/pcl-1.7/html/ (or your local PCL doc build path)

After that change the Apache directory options:

$ sudo gedit +153 /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

Replace the paragraph at line 153 with:

<Directory />
    #Options FollowSymLinks
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes ExecCGI
    AllowOverride All
    Order deny,allow
    Allow from all
</Directory>

Restart Apache and the search bar will now work if you open localhost:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
$ firefox localhost