cppmanlite

Lightweight serverless C++ documentation lookup — a pure Python package and static site powered by cppreference.com.

Features

• Pure Python — no C dependencies, works in CPython, Pyodide, Jupyter
• Static site — served from GitHub Pages or any static host
• Client-side search — lunr.js fuzzy search over a ~1MB index
• On-demand page loading — fetches from cppreference.com or local bundle
• Auto-updating — GitHub Action refreshes the index monthly
• Kubernetes-ready — Helm chart included for /cppmanlite route

Python package

pip install cppmanlite

import cppmanlite

# Search for C++ documentation
cppmanlite.search("vector")
# [{'title': 'std::vector', 'url': 'cpp/container/vector.html', ...}, ...]

# Display a page (renders HTML in Jupyter, plain text in terminal)
cppmanlite.man("std::vector")

# Alias
cppmanlite.help("sort")

Works in Pyodide (Python in the browser) — no compiled dependencies required.

Static site

The site/ directory contains a standalone search UI:

• index.html — search box + results + page reader
• app.js — lunr.js search + on-demand page fetching
• style.css — dark/light theme

Deployed to GitHub Pages at: https://dive4dec.github.io/cppmanlite/

Docker / Kubernetes

docker build -t cppmanlite:v1 .

Multi-stage build: downloads the cppreference HTML archive, strips boilerplate, builds a search index, and serves everything via nginx.

helm install cppmanlite ./chart -n cppmanlite

Serves at https://socratic.cs.cityu.edu.hk/cppmanlite/

How it works

1. Index building (scripts/build_index.py): Downloads the cppreference HTML book archive, extracts page titles + snippets, fixes relative URLs, and writes a compact JSON index (~1.2MB for 6,000+ pages).

2. Search: lunr.js builds a client-side full-text search index from the JSON. Results show title, URL path, and a content snippet.

3. Page reading: When a user clicks a result, the reader fetches the page — either from a local docs/ bundle (Docker/K8s deployment) or directly from cppreference.com (GitHub Pages).

4. Auto-update: A GitHub Action runs monthly, downloads the latest cppreference archive, rebuilds the index, and deploys to GitHub Pages.

Data source

Documentation from cppreference.com, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 / GFDL. The HTML book archive is published by PeterFeicht/cppreference-doc.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.