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Install HeaderDoc on Ubuntu

26 Feb 2012 : howto, dev

HeaderDoc is a very versatile document generation system by Apple, which can handle a wide variety of languages. The latter was the reason for me to give it a chance, since other generator either work only with a specific language or produce (for me) unusable results. HeaderDoc works fine with PHP, JavaScript etc. which makes it a perfect tool for web projects - otherwise you’ll have to deal with different tools, which can’t produce combined docs.

HeaderDocs comes with Mac OS X (at least when you have Xcode installed). But I wanted to use it on my Ubuntu server where Jenkins does all the integration stuff.

Apple has open-sourced HeaderDoc and you can find it on Apple’s open source website at http://www.opensource.apple.com/

Downlaod & unpack

  • The most recent version is in the Mac OS X 10.7.3 tree; copy this link and download the archive into a directory on your Linux machine: http://www.opensource.apple.com/tarballs/headerdoc/headerdoc-8.8.38.tar.gz

  • wget http://www.opensource.apple.com/tarballs/headerdoc/headerdoc-8.8.38.tar.gz

  • unpack with tar -xvzf headerdoc-8.8.38.tar.gz and cd into the created directory

Requirements

HeaderDocs is basically a PERL script, so you’ll need a recent PERL installation. This should be the case on every ‘normal’ system, so I won’t dive into installing PERL here. Besides that, HeaderDoc needs some other libraries. If they’re not installed, run the following commands:

  • FreezeThaw

  • sudo apt-get install libfreezethaw-perl

  • libxml2-dev

  • sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev

  • xmllint (from the libxml2-utils)

  • sudo apt-get install libxml2-utils

  • checkinstall (not necessary for this installation, but you should alway use checkinstall, when manually installing software, which circumvents the Ubuntu/Debian package system!)
  • sudo apt-get install checkinstall

Build & install

  • make clean
  • make - This will actually compile the software & libraries and performs a lot of tests. Three of them (‘class 3’, ‘header 5’, ‘template 1’) failed during my install, but I didn’t notice any false behaviour using HeaderDoc.
  • sudo checkinstall make realinstall

Ready. You should have now two files in /usr/bin/:

  • headerdoc2html - the processor itself
  • gatherheaderdoc - a utility to combine the docs in an overview

You’ll find the documentaion for HeaderDoc on Apple’s developer site