Originally I was planning on just hosting the Manos docs on the project site. I’ve never really used offline doc tools like Monodoc for whatever reason I’ve always just been more comfortable using my browser to read docs online.

Unfortunately, there are two issues with online docs.

The first one is obvious. Sometimes you can’t access them. Either because you don’t have internet, or something is broken on their side.

The second problem is a little more subtle but can cause big problems. You need to make sure the docs you are reading match the version you have installed. In some cases, even the type of installation you have is important. For example, file layout might be different across different operating systems.

To combat these two issues I’ve added a -docs command to the manos tool. This will start a manos server on port 8181 that hosts the docs that were installed with manos. So you can go to http://localhost:8181/ in your browser and know you are reading the correct version of docs for your manos install.