[Abandoned Plugin] MarlinGcodeDocumentation

[gudvinr]

Which Plugin?

https://plugins.octoprint.org/plugins/marlingcodedocumentation/

Link to ticket on plugin's issue tracker confirming abandonment

costas-basdekis/MarlinGcodeDocumentation#25

Is there someone open to adopting it?

No response

[jneilliii]

I'll give the plugin author one more week to respond to the issue posted on their repo, but yes looks to be abandoned.

[thomasnemer]

Hi @jneilliii 👋

I don't know what it takes to maintain an Octoprint plugin, but I find this one very useful, so I'll read some docs and maybe I'll raise my hand to take over as maintainer :)

[dietervdwes]

I must say I personally also find this plugin super useful. Wouldn't mind helping maintaining.

[gudvinr]

It seems that plugin generates machine-readable docs here

So basically you need to fork their repos and set up documentation generator via github actions or something else that periodically updates data.

There could be issues caused by marlin changing documentation format so this must be fixed too.

[jneilliii]

yeah, looking at the plugin code, it seems to already have a documentation update mechanism and with settings to pull from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/costas-basdekis/gcode-documentation-parser/output/output/all_codes.json, which hasn't been updated in 2 years. They do seem to have an action workflow to automate this, but I suspect either a secret key expired or something and it's no longer running on a regular basis. Like you said, it would technically just be a forking of that plugin and re-point the plugin's setting to the forked output json file.

[thomasnemer]

I've forked the gcode-documentation-parser repo here, and refreshed it a bit :

• switch from poetry to uv
• use mise
• rewrote workflows

The generated documentation seems coherent to me.

[thomasnemer]

Works pretty well actually, I fed the plugin with my fork's output, here's what it gives for a command that's part of the last commit of my output branch :

[jneilliii]

Was going to test out your export, but I can't seem to get the plugin to load at all with default settings with the following error in browser's developer tools.

Issue was related to not having the js bundled I think. Once I removed the following from my config.yaml it loads fine.

devel:
  webassets:
    bundle: false
    minify: false

plugin doesn't like windows instances at all, when attempting to update it gives errors. if someone does adopt this plugin it might be something to add to the list of issues.

2025-02-12 23:23:38,026 - octoprint.plugins.marlingcodedocumentation - INFO - Updating GCode documentation...
2025-02-12 23:23:38,026 - octoprint.plugins.marlingcodedocumentation - INFO -  * Fetching https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thomasnemer/gcode-documentation-parser/refs/heads/output/output/all_codes.json
2025-02-12 23:23:38,209 - octoprint.plugins.marlingcodedocumentation - INFO -  * Saving update (843932 bytes) temporarily to C:\OctoPrint-Windows\basedir\5000\data\marlingcodedocumentation\new-all_codes.json before renaming to C:\OctoPrint-Windows\basedir\5000\data\marlingcodedocumentation\all_codes.json
2025-02-12 23:23:38,220 - octoprint.server.api - ERROR - Error while executing SimpleApiPlugin marlingcodedocumentation
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\OctoPrint-Windows\WPy64-31050\python-3.10.5.amd64\lib\site-packages\octoprint\server\api\__init__.py", line 161, in pluginCommand
    response = api_plugin.on_api_command(command, data)
  File "C:\OctoPrint-Windows\WPy64-31050\python-3.10.5.amd64\lib\site-packages\octoprint\util\__init__.py", line 1686, in wrapper
    return f(*args, **kwargs)
  File "C:\OctoPrint-Windows\WPy64-31050\python-3.10.5.amd64\lib\site-packages\octoprint_marlingcodedocumentation\__init__.py", line 163, in on_api_command
    self.update_documentation()
  File "C:\OctoPrint-Windows\WPy64-31050\python-3.10.5.amd64\lib\site-packages\octoprint_marlingcodedocumentation\__init__.py", line 140, in update_documentation
    new_all_codes_path.rename(self.documentation_path)
  File "C:\OctoPrint-Windows\WPy64-31050\python-3.10.5.amd64\lib\pathlib.py", line 1234, in rename
    self._accessor.rename(self, target)
FileExistsError: [WinError 183] Cannot create a file when that file already exists: 'C:\\OctoPrint-Windows\\basedir\\5000\\data\\marlingcodedocumentation\\new-all_codes.json' -> 'C:\\OctoPrint-Windows\\basedir\\5000\\data\\marlingcodedocumentation\\all_codes.json'

I'd also switch this bit of js

            self.onUpdateDocumentation = async function () {
              var response = await fetch("/api/plugin/marlingcodedocumentation", {
                method: "POST",
                headers: {
                  "Content-Type": "application/json",
                  "X-Api-Key": self.settingsViewModel.api_key()
                },
                body: JSON.stringify({
                  command: "update-documentation"
                })
              });
        
              if (!response.ok) {
                return;
              }
        
              var newData = await response.json();
        
              if (!newData) {
                return;
              }
        
              self.documentationService.update(newData);
            };

with

            self.onUpdateDocumentation = function () {
                    OctoPrint.simpleApiCommand("marlingcodedocumentation", "update-documentation", {}})
                        .done(function (data) {
                            if (!data) {
                                return;
                            }
                            self.documentationService.update(data);
                        });
            };

to avoid 403 forbidden errors.

[thomasnemer]

I didn't have a look at the plugin itself yet, only the gcode parser. I intended do dig into it asap. I'm not very comfortable with javascript and frontend stuff in general, but that might be a good opportunity to improve myself. I'll do the same as for the gcode parser, fork the repo, and spend some time playing with it.

[costas-basdekis]

Hello everyone, sorry for the late response.

I've now fixed the parser (there were some issues with setuptools and poetry).

The problem is that Github actions stops running after 3 months if there is no repo activity, and now it will commit regardless of if there are any documentation changes or not, so hopefully it will not stop updating.

If anybody wants to collaborate on these 2 repos I'm happy to chat.

[costas-basdekis]

@jneilliii If you create an issue (or PR) or two with some more information I would be happy to have a look at them

Update: I have now fixed them (I think) in v0.20.0

[costas-basdekis]

I hope this recent activity justifies removing the "abandoned" tag 😅

But still happy to have collaborators and co-maintainers

[jneilliii]

It most certainly does @costas-basdekis. Making that change now. As for your workflow being disabled, you might want to check out these changes I've made to my stale workflows to keep the action from being disabled.

jneilliii/OctoPrint-PrusaSlicerThumbnails@cd52394

It uses this GitHub action: https://github.com/gautamkrishnar/keepalive-workflow

[costas-basdekis]

Thanks for the recommendation.

What I did, is include a date in the output instead, which forces a commit regardless of changes.

This also has the benefit of showing to the end user how recent the update is.