Skip to content

[Docs] Pull content from README into lambda-runtime crate docs #990

Open
@jlizen

Description

@jlizen

We have a fairly rich README in the repository, but very minimalist lambda-runtime docs (same goes for lambda-extension, but i think lambda-runtime is most important). I know the README already shows in GitHub, and on crates.io, but docs.rs adds discoverability as well. It gives the impression that the crate is well-maintained (which it is), whereas sparse docs.rs docs don't look so great.

Even without a full from-scratch crate docs write, I think it would add a lot of value to make some of the content in the README show up in docs.rs.

How to do it

Bad options

Simple include_str!

A simple way to do this would just be to add:

#![doc = include_str!("../../README.md")]

However the first section with all the badges break. So I don't think this is a good option.

include-utils

There is a crate, include-utils, that does pretty much exactly what we need. It would allow only including a subset of the file, so we would include everything after the first section.

However, it would force a new proc macro-based dependency into our primary dependencies, which I don't love. It also seems maintained but is not widely used.

So, I don't think this is a great option either.

Good options

Custom build.rs handling to filter the file

Instead of using the proc macro, we could also just filter the file into what we need via a custom build.rs. This is nice too since then we could replace the badges with regular links to the related crates, which would be kind of nice.

The downside here is a bit of added complexity, but I don't mind knocking it out if desired.

Move most of docs into crate docs, use cargo-readme

The other good option is to flip things around and migrate the source of truth to be the library docs proper. Then the tool cargo-readme lets us generate the markdown README from those.

This has the added benefit of making it really easy to add cross-linking to types and functions inside the crate docs, which is nice.

The downside is that now we need to generate README changes via an extra build step. I guess we could add a pre-commit hook to do it so that nobody forgets?

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions