Setup your own Drupal API reference site

One of the key reasons I was drawn to Drupal as a platform is that it had great developer documentation available. The Drupal API reference site, api.drupal.org, was and is one of my most used resources.

As good as the site is though, if you happen to have a long commute (like myself) or you're just about to jump on a plane to DrupalCon, you aren't always guaranteed to have access to it. So in cases like that you need your own copy.

There's long been instructions to setup your own copy of the site, but in a world of Features and Drupal.org packaged distributions, we at Realityloop decided that installing a local API site manually was an unnecessary task.

Introducing the DrupalAPI distribution, a two-step process to get your own local API reference site; download and install.

Checkout the following video to see just how easy it is.

It's important to note that while I used Aegir for the installation in the video, it's not mandatory, the site is can be installed as just like any normal Drupal site.

As easy as installation is, we also wanted to make sure it was just as easy to update your API source files, so included in the distribution, inside the DrupalAPI profile directory, there's an update shell script, executing this from command line will either re-download the API source files, linked to their GIT repository (the first time) or update directly from the GIT repository (subsequent times), and then trigger the site to update the database.

So checkout, head over to the DrupalAPI distribution project page and download a copy and let us know how it goes for you.