Edit: I’ve submitted a pull request that will render step 3 obsolete. I will update this article when it’s merged. These instructions can also be used for NumPy.

Edit edit: The pull request has been merged, rendering step 3 obsolete. These instructions are now effectively the same as those in the pylookup README.

(This also works for NumPy, SciPy, etc.)

I’ve been using Taesoo Kim’s pylookup for a while now to lookup Python documentation offline in Emacs. It’s a wonderful tool, especially combined with Emacs’ w3m browser, allowing Python programmers to lookup documentation without ever leaving the Emacs frame.

Here’s how to lookup offline Django documentation with pylookup:

I have pylookup installed through el-get, so it’s in ~/.emacs.d/el-get/pylookup. These instructions are modeled on Taesoo’s “Create Database” instructions in the Github README, but with a slight modification.

1. Download and unzip the Django HTML documentation from https://www.djangoproject.com/m/docs/django-docs-dev-en.zip
2. Move the resulting folder to the pylookup folder
3. pylookup’s database creation expects a genindex-all.html file in the documentation folder. Let’s create that file by copying Django’s genindex.html:

   cp django-docs-dev-en/genindex.html django-docs-dev-en/genindex-all.html

4. Add the Django documentation to pylookup’s documentation index (I already have the python standard library documentation indexed as per Taesoo’s instructions):

   ./pylookup.py -a -u django-docs-dev-en

   (Note the -a option that appends the newly indexed Django docs to the existing standard library docs rather than replacing them)

I can add more complete documentation for setting up pylookup if necessary, but between the Github README and this extra, you should be able to work it out.

Happy coding!