Download websites that use RDoc

About RDoc

Documentation generators are strange residents of a web technology index, because nobody deploys them the way a server or a shopping cart gets deployed. RDoc runs on a developer's machine or inside a build job, reads Ruby source files and their comments, and writes out static HTML. What reaches the public internet is that HTML, so a match here means our crawler recognised the output of the generator rather than the generator itself.

RDoc dates from 2001 and is written for Ruby, which ties it to one ecosystem rather than to a general market. Published API references for open source libraries, internal documentation parked on a company subdomain, and archived project sites are the usual places the output turns up. A hit therefore describes what a host publishes, not what powers the rest of the site, and the two should not be confused when the record is used for targeting.

The licence recorded is Ruby or GPL-2.0-only, and the tool has long travelled with the language distribution itself. Software that arrives bundled leaves no purchase trail, no customer list and no download counter worth quoting, which is why detection across a crawl is one of the few ways to observe its footprint at all. Our category for it is Documentation, a bucket that collects everything which is not a server, a framework or a commercial platform.

As of October 2026 the index records 1 sites carrying the signature. A figure that small should be read as a detection floor, and the reasons are specific to documentation output. Generated pages are often rebuilt with custom themes that strip the footer and class names a fingerprint depends on, docs are commonly hosted on shared documentation services under someone else's markup, and the generator's own conventions changed across releases, so older and newer output do not look alike.

Researchers who care about this entry are usually mapping developer ecosystems rather than buying anything: package registries, developer tool vendors sizing a language community, and security teams looking for documentation trees that expose internal class and method names on public hosts. Checking a single domain answers whether that one host publishes Ruby documentation. The downloadable dataset answers which hosts across the entire crawl do, together with the servers, analytics and hosting they sit on, and that inverse question is not one you can ask a domain at a time.