Hard to generate easy-to-browse documentation for product-y projects

[ento]

It'd be useful to be able to have a searchable documentation for projects that are not intended to be published, i.e. projects for apps/products. However, currently (Elm 0.18) there's no official way to do so. Because..

1. Hard to generate documentation.json for product-y projects

   • elm-make's --doc option only generates documentation for modules that are exposed, but it's unrealistic to maintain the list by hand.
     • We currently have 300 Elm modules in our codebase: we'd rather not add those to exposed-modules manually ..which might not be that bad if we actually tried

2. No easy way to make a viewer for documentation.json that can be privately hosted

   • Hosting your own package.elm-lang.org is not really streamlined/documented: https://github.com/elm-lang/package.elm-lang.org/issues/110
   • There's an attempt at a local viewer, but hasn't been updated for two years: https://github.com/jcollard/elm-doc-viewer

Other nice-to-haves:

• Our current internal guideline is to document modules that are reusable across different pages: for non-reusable modules, we want to relax the enforcement to have doc comments for every exposed thing

Current workaround:

• elm-doc generates documentation.json by exposing modules temporarily, and then generates all necessary files to make a static clone of package.elm-lang.org.

[process-bot]

Thanks for the issue! Make sure it satisfies this checklist. My human colleagues will appreciate it!

Here is what to expect next, and if anyone wants to comment, keep these things in mind.

[evancz]

The long term idea is to have elm reactor give you a bunch of viewing options. See the code, see the docs, see it in REPL, see it in debug mode, etc. So that is where this will go eventually. I do not think keeping this issue open will impact time-to-completion, so I will close.