Update from the future: It’s 2018 and HAProxy is now hosting manuals in html form, making this thing totally obsolete. I guess they were taking their time to properly test that whole html feature thing (you know, like with SPDY and http/2 adoption) Also, the “nice people” from the article is Cyril Bonté who is finally hosting it in a way that gets some love from the search engines so that plebs and muggles like me can actually find it with ease. http://cbonte.github.io/haproxy-dconv/
As a sysadmin, I’ve adopted a nice practice of always reading product manuals before fiddling around with things. Be it some application or a dish washer. Considering that I like reading manuals, I also like searching them, having references, and actually having them in a format nicer than plain old text. Especially complex 100+ page ones !
Recently I wanted to re-read HAProxy’s 1.7 manual, but it’s distributed only as plain text and I really find that unreadable to the point of wanting to change it. Looks like I’m not the only one. Some nice people already made a python converter from HAProxy’s standard .txt files to wonderfully searcheable and indexed html. haproxy-dconv
In case anyone else finds it useful, it’s right down here, and also on my downloads site
Enjoy !