Installing and syncing

docspack is a CLI. Run it with npx docspack <command>, or install it as a dev dependency to pin the version your team uses.

Requirements

Node 22.5 or newer. The index uses node:sqlite from the Node standard library, so there is no native module to compile and npx docspack starts without a build step.

Adding a documentation package

Documentation packages are ordinary npm dependencies. Add one the way you add anything else:

pnpm add -D @acme/docspack
npx docspack sync

docspack sync reads dependencies and devDependencies from the project’s package.json, keeps the entries named @vendor/docspack, @vendor/<name>-docspack or @docspack-community/*, resolves each one in node_modules, and indexes its chunks.

A dependency that ships a .llms/manifest.json under any other name is not indexed, and sync says so rather than passing over it: it names the package, the number of chunks its manifest declares, and the shapes it would have matched. A pack nobody can read is nearly always a publishing mistake, and the alternative to reporting it is a question answered confidently from the wrong corpus.

It then reads the other dependencies — the ordinary libraries — and indexes one entry per name their type declarations export, so a question about something nobody documented can still be answered from the installed build. See answers from the installed build.

Both halves of that walk upwards from the working directory: the declaration is read from the nearest package.json and from every ancestor, and the install is resolved through every node_modules above. So a monorepo that declares its documentation once in the repository root is found from any workspace member, which is where an agent usually is.

What sync does on the second run

Indexing is keyed by name and version. A package already present in the index is reported as cached and its files are not read again:

+ @acme/docspack@1.4.0  128 chunks  indexed
= @other/docspack@2.0.0  44 chunks  cached

Bump a dependency and the new version is indexed as a new entry; the old one stays in the database for any project still using it. To re-read a package whose contents changed without a version bump, which happens while authoring, pass --force.

Inspecting a project

docspack list shows the documentation packages this project depends on and whether each is in the index:

@acme/docspack@1.4.0  128 chunks  indexed

Problems are reported rather than hidden. A package that is declared but not installed, or installed but missing its manifest, is named on stderr so it does not silently disappear from search results.

Choosing where the index lives

The default is ~/.docspack/store.db. Override it with --store <path> on any command, or by setting the DOCSPACK_STORE environment variable. A per-project index is occasionally useful in CI, where a clean database makes runs reproducible:

DOCSPACK_STORE=.cache/docspack.db npx docspack sync

The database is safe to delete. Everything in it can be rebuilt from node_modules with docspack sync.