Documex

Documentation Explorer

1. Supply backend a local directory path with arbitrarily nested markdown files
2. Start up frontend which will
   • Display all markdown files found in the given directory in a tree structure
   • Render selected markdown file to read it

Start backend and frontend in same terminal window:

1. make start

Or separately as:

1. cd backend && python main.py
2. cd frontend && npm run dev

example_dir/

This directory contains a small set of files and directories to test the application with. It contains markdown files at varying levels in the file tree, alongside other files.

This hopefully shows the (somewhat) intended purpose of this application where you have a lot of repos with documentation (as markdown files) scattered about. This application should make it a little bit nicer to navigate and discover these markdown files to give you a better overview of where which bit of documentation exists.

To do

• (BE) Add option (and probably as default) to ignore directories like .git/, node_modules/, .venv/.
  • 🟠 Partially done. Perhaps making this configurable would be nice as it is hardcoded right now
• (FE) Make the loading/selected/fetching an MD file path based
  • i.e. now {filepath: "dir_1/dir_2/file.md"} is sent in a POST request make this a GET request with URL [localhost:3030]/dir_1/dir_2/file.md
  • This will make reloading the page have the expected behavior as well
  • Perhaps adding a button to clear the selected file would be nice
  • Also when refreshing the browser it would be nice if it didn't try to always fetch the file again (and list of files for the matter) each time but rather use some kind of cache we keep locally (in localStorage perhaps) such that we see some content faster!
  • 🟠 Pretty much done except for using a cached version on browser reload, having a button to clear the selected file, and the file being visible in the file tree sidebar on browser reload (also it doesn't make a GET request either to fetch the file, should be fine though)
• (BE/FE) Investigate using WebSockets to be able receive updates from the server in case the markdown file tree has changed and when the current selected md file's content has changed, send the new state/version so it can be seamlessly updated in the frontend.
• (FE) After a browser reload with a path in the URL, e.g. localhost:3000/path/to/file.md, make sure the loaded file in revealed in the file-tree sidebar (i.e. the part of the tree leading to this file should be visible). Additionally when reloading with and additional header ID in the URL, e.g. localhost:3000/path/to/file.md#_header2, it should scroll to this header ID just as it would when clicking on an on-page header from the right-sidebar when the content is already loaded.
• (FE) Make GitHub task lists display properly
• (FE) Add a search functionality to quickly find and select a file
  • This can be done in the sidebar or in a modal popup, the latter will probably feel nicer