Where is the man page?

Feature Requests
1 
$ man certbot
No manual entry for certbot
$

Really? Wow. Seems like a simple thing.

fyi: Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS

2

This question is probably better suited for the certbot team at EFF.

@bmw

Sorry to put you on the spot. Any thoughts on this one? I personally can't recall a request for a man page being made before.

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3

You could also check the issues and see if such a request has already been made,
if not you could request it.

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4

Certbot has a man page (auto-generated it seems?), but the formatting is very strange.

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5

The Arch Linux package gets the manpage from:

  # create man pages
  make -C docs man

So the Ubuntu package is omitting that step?
Better file the request with Ubuntu then.

Edit: you probably want to look at certbot(7) instead:

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6

With Ubuntu the recommended Certbot install is using snap

Then use: certbot --help

For install instructions: https://certbot.eff.org/

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7

Those are probably just generated by the package managers of those distribution and probably simply takes the certbot --help all output with some headers/introduction above and below that output.

The Certbot team is very small and don't have much time to put into Certbot unfortunately. Even relatively simple issues on Certbot itself take a lot of time to implement. The current certbot --help all output is automatically generated from within the Certbot code. Having to maintain a man page would take up precious time of the Certbot team and doesn't really add much.

Also, the Feature Requests category is for Let's Encrypt feature requests, NOT for Certbot, which is developed by EFF. Not ISRG/LE.

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8

They could do a one-time thing like:

$ man certbot
see 'certbot --help all' instead
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9

I stand corrected: the man pages are apparently pulled in by a file in the Certbot repo:

and that's piped through rst2man apparently in

Not sure how or if snaps can install man pages tho?

By the way, there already was an issue about this from back in 2020:

And from some searching, it looks like snap doesn't have a way to add man pages from the snap into the path used by man.

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10

osiris is right. it's currently not possible for us to provide a man page with the certbot snap. see Support for man pages - snapd - snapcraft.io

the package you can install through apt from ubuntu's repositories does have a man page, but those packages rarely see updates due to the policies of LTS distros so we point our users towards the snaps

essentially all of the man page contents come from certbot --help output so i'd recommend taking a look at that and/or our online docs at Welcome to the Certbot documentation! — Certbot 5.1.0 documentation

sorry we can't exactly give you the feature you want, but i hope these suggestions help

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11

Thanks for responding here, @bmw.

Good to see you. :slightly_smiling_face:

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