houdinimd-docs

A parser and search engine for the Houdini documentation.

Houdini ships its help as thousands of text pages (about 12,000 in Houdini 22.0 with SideFX Labs), written in SideFX's own wiki markup. Nothing outside Houdini reads that format. This module parses the markup, converts every page to clean Markdown, and indexes all of them for ranked full-text search.

It is the documentation engine of the HoudiniMD desktop app, written in Rust and compiled into a Python module. The HoudiniMCP bridge uses it.

No documentation ships in this package. Every page comes from the help files of an installed Houdini, so the text matches that build exactly.

import houdinimd_docs

docs = houdinimd_docs.Docs("/path/to/a/folder/for/the/index")
docs.installs()                          # the Houdini builds found, newest first
docs.page("nodes/sop/copytopoints")      # one page, as Markdown
docs.search("copy to points", limit=5)   # ranked full-text search
docs.page("hom/hou/Node", build="21.0.829")

Every call returns a JSON string. page raises ValueError when the build has no such page.

The first search on a build indexes it into a SQLite file in the folder you name, which takes a few seconds. The index stays there, so this happens once per build. A page read never waits for it.

Without build, the reader uses the Houdini in $HFS, then the newest build it finds. The build comes from the install's own SYS_Version.h, never from its folder name.