Your own api.drupal.org site

I decided to spend the evening figuring out how to make my own copy of api.drupal.org so that if it should ever become unavailable, I wouldn't be stuck. Hopefully this will help other people as well. :)

Step 1: Gathering the files

You'll need two things:

1. A copy of the API module; found in the contributions repository, under /modules/api/
2. A copy of the development documentation; found in the contributions repository, under /docs/developer/. i suggest checking this out from CVS.

Step 2: Installation

1. Install the api modules as usual.
2. Enable the API module, by going to administer > modules, checking the Enable box next to the api module, and finally clicking Save Configuration. This will give you two additional menu items: API reference (at the very top) and administer > API reference (for 4.7.x) or administer > Site configuration > API reference (for 5.x).

Step 3: Indexing

1. Go to administer > API reference (for 4.7.x) or administer > Site configuration > API reference (for 5.x).
2. Under branches to index, enter a Short name, Long name, and Directory for your Drupal installation. For example, my Drupal installation is from HEAD, so I entered:

Short name: HEAD
Long name: Drupal HEAD

Directory: /absolute/path/to/your/drupal/installation (in my case, this was /home/username/drupal) -- Make sure to leave off the trailing slash!

Click Save changes when finished.

3. Repeat for any other Drupal branches you might have installed. In my case, I only had one, so I left it as-is.
4. Next, click the Index PHP manual pages button. This will parse PHP-specific function names and so on so they can be referenced in the code samples.

NOTE: My host has disabled remote use of file_get_contents() for security reasons, so I had to replace line 13 in parser.inc with cURL function calls:

//$source = file_get_contents($location);
  $ch = curl_init();
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $location);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
  $source = curl_exec($ch);
  curl_close($ch);
5. Click Reindex to tag all files for reindexing. A message will appear at the top notifying you that this has been done, and informing you that the index will be rebuilt during the next few runs of cron.php. Waiting for cron.php will take way too long, though (it only indexes 10 files at a time, and cron.php runs every hour). Sooo...

Step 4: Finishing touches

1. Instead, open the link to cron.php and reload the page numerous times, until you quit seeing messages like Parsing "/some/path/somefile.ext".... For me, this was after about 10 or so refreshes, but it will probably be much more if you have a full-featured Drupal installation.
2. Finally, and I have no idea why this is, but it seems you have to go back to administer > modules and Save Configuration again. After that, clicking on API reference up at the top will supply a sub-menu containing whatever long name(s) you entered in the previous steps, which will then take you to the documentation for your installation of Drupal (without this step, API reference is just a blank page).

And voila!

The one thing I couldn't get working were the example modules (e.g. "How to define blocks"). They're in the /module/developer/examples/ folder, but for some reason don't match up with where the API module thinks they should be. Any hints anyone might have would be greatly appreciated. :)

Notes from chx. For me, example modules worked fine. But I needed to raise PHP memory limit significantly.