How to get Yardoc to output to STDOUT?

I've looked for templates that come with the gem (I can only find the default HTML outputter), I've searched the help and online docs for a switch that will redirect to STDOUT. I can't find anything on how I might approach this.

Is there an easy way to do this (perhaps a shell command?) or do I have wade through the source code?

Solution

Create the following file as test.rb:

# This class is cool
class Test
  # This method is also cool
  def foo
  end
end

You must compile the yard documentation before you can output this. But you don't want the doc folder right? So let's omit that.
```
yardoc --no-output test.rb
```
This will only update the documentation inside .yardoc folder which is hidden. The doc folder will not be generated.

Now you can see the documentation for specific objects in a few ways:

> yard display "Test"
# Outputs:
------------------------------------------ Class: Foo < Object

    This class is cool



--------------------------------------------------------------

> yard display "Test#foo"
# Outputs:
------------------------------------------ Method: #meth (Foo)
                                          (Defined in: foo.rb)

    foo.meth -> Object
--------------------------------------------------------------

    This method is cool

This is the output that you get. You can get the yard documentation for any class/method using the yard display command.

But hey, the output sucks! Let's create a template for it. Create the following templates folder with a few files:

+ your app
  + templates
    + default
      + class
      | + text
      |   + setup.rb
      |       def init
      |         super
      |         sections T('docstring')
      |       end
      + method
      | + text
      |   + setup.rb
      |       def init
      |         super
      |         sections T('docstring')
      |       end
      + method_details
      | + text
      |   + setup.rb
      |       def init
      |         super
      |         sections T('docstring')
      |       end

All the setup.rb files must have the same content like def init, super, sections T('docstring'), end. This will make the text output display only the documentation, without any fancy headers and stuff.

Now just run the same yard display command, but let's use our custom templates:

> yard display Foo --template-path ./templates

This class is cool

> yard display "Foo#meth" --template-path ./templates

This method is cool

That's it. You may find that the yard doc may have too much of leading/trailing new lines in the output, you can use some other standard linux head/tail commands to fix that.