docfx: Installation instructions fail for 2.5.2

The getting started docs for using docfx from DNX include:

dnu commands install docfx

That manages to find v2.5.2, but fails at the end with:

The specified package is not an application. The package was added but no commands were installed.

(Nothing is added to the dnx\packages\docfx directory as far as I can see.)

Presumably this is due to phasing out the DNX branch entirely, but it would be worth removing the non-working instructions (and ideally replacing them with working ones…)

Using the zip file from 2.5.2 works to some extent, although it’s throwing an exception which I’ll report separately…

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 8 years ago
Comments: 19 (9 by maintainers)

Commits related to this issue

Install mono before building gh-pages from docfx See https://github.com/dotnet/docfx/issues/718#issuecomment-401672036 — committed to dotnetconfig/dotnet-config by kzu 4 years ago

Most upvoted comments

Ok, I’ve managed to make it work. I wasn’t using the command line properly. If you’re on mac, and are not an expert (like me) this might help you :

install mono for mac
Install the tutorial C# project
Download the last release of docfx
Just unzip the file to the docfx-seed project folder : docfx-seed/docf/
cd to your docfx-seed directory, where the docfx.json file resides
build the doc with the following command : mono docfx/docfx.exe build
you can serve the _site folder with the following command : mono docfx/docfx.exe serve

Maybe this few lines could be added to the readme or startup guidelines as they might help people setting up this great tool ??

+12

lionpeloux on Oct 27, 2016

I was able to get this running. I’m not sure exactly what changed. Here is what I did:

sudo apt install mono-devel (even though I already had mono installed)
sudo apt install mono-complete
cd docfx/docfx-seed-master
mono docfx/docfx.exe build
mono docfx/docfx.exe serve
new terminal firefox http://localhost:8080 Its weird to me that it serves the directory up rather than the site itself. Clicking _site shows the correct site (yay!)

SeaDude on Jul 1, 2019

You should probably mention the minimum version of mono needed. I had 3.x installed and it didn’t work. 5.x did though

cdmdotnet on Aug 10, 2017