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How to generate documentation for Rust projects that are only on github

If you want to read the docs for a Rust project that isn't on crates.io (such as the main branch on github) you can clone the repo, then run cargo doc. For example, with SWC (which is a workspace), we can run

shell

git clone https://github.com/swc-project/swc
cd swc
cargo doc --workspace

In some cases you'll run into an experimental feature in a dependency's docs, such as this one from serde, a dependency of swc (which uses nightly rust).

shell

❯ cargo doc --workspace
 Documenting serde v1.0.125
 Documenting swc_visit v0.2.4 (/Users/chris/tmp/swc/visit)
error[E0658]: linking to associated items of raw pointers is experimental
   |
   = note: see issue #80896 <https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/80896> for more information
   = help: add `#![feature(intra_doc_pointers)]` to the crate attributes to enable
   = note: rustdoc does not allow disambiguating between `*const` and `*mut`, and pointers are unstable until it does

error: aborting due to previous error

For more information about this error, try `rustc --explain E0658`.
error: could not document `serde`

To work around this, since we don't really need serde's documentation to be generated, we can use --no-deps. We can also use --open to open the generated documentation.

shell

cargo doc --workspace --no-deps --open