An ordinary salmon ate nine hazelnuts that fell into Tobar Segais - the Well of Wisdom - from the nine hazel trees that surrounded the well, and gained all the world’s knowledge.

— Irish mythology

Introduction

Tobar Segais serves versioned documentation archives. Point it at a directory of .zip or .jar files and it publishes each one at a stable URL, with a navigation tree, full-text search and a version picker.

It is a single static binary with no runtime dependencies. There is no application server, no JVM and no database.

It does not have to run at all. The same content can be written out as a static site — pages, assets and a search index that is queried in the browser — and hosted on GitHub Pages or anything else that serves files. See Static sites.

What changed in 2.0

Version 2.0 is a rewrite in Go. The 1.x releases were a Java web application that ran in a servlet container and read its content from inside its own WAR file.

The differences that matter day to day:

Content is no longer packaged with the application

Archives live in a directory the server watches. Adding, replacing or removing one takes effect without a rebuild or a restart.

The server starts immediately

Opening an archive reads only its metadata and table of contents. The full-text index is built in the background, so documentation is readable straight away and search becomes available shortly after.

Archives describe themselves

A generated nav.html carries the tree of pages and the bundle’s slug and version together, so nothing is maintained twice. Eclipse InfoCenter bundles are still supported, and still need no Eclipse or OSGi machinery to serve. See Legacy Eclipse bundles.

Any zip will do

An archive needs a table of contents and some HTML. It does not need to be an Eclipse help bundle, and it does not need to be built by Maven.

Markdown needs nothing installed

Markdown is rendered inside the tool, so a directory of .md files becomes a versioned, searchable manual with one command and no toolchain. AsciiDoc and Typst are supported too, and need their own converters.