Ubuntu Manpages Operator is a charm for deploying https://manpages.ubuntu.com, a site which contains thousands of dynamically generated manuals, extracted from every supported version of Ubuntu and updated on a regular basis.

This reposistory contains both the application code and the code for the charm.

The application code was taken from the original Launchpad repository, with some minor modifications to make it more easily configurable with the charm.

Assuming you have access to a bootstrapped Juju controller, you can deploy the charm with:

❯ juju deploy ubuntu-manpages

Once the charm is deployed, you can check the status with Juju status:

❯ juju status Model Controller Cloud/Region Version SLA Timestamp testing localhost-localhost localhost/localhost 3.6.6 unsupported 11:06:36+01:00 App Version Status Scale Charm Channel Rev Exposed Message ubuntu-manpages maintenance 1 ubuntu-manpages 0 no Updating manpages Unit Workload Agent Machine Public address Ports Message ubuntu-manpages/0* maintenance idle 1 10.245.163.53 8080/tcp Updating manpages Machine State Address Inst id Base AZ Message 1 started 10.245.163.53 juju-3a79fc-4 ubuntu@24.04 Running

You can see from the status that the application has been assigned an IP address, and is listening on port 8080. Using the example above, browsing to http://10.245.163.53:8080 would display the homepage for the application.

On first start up, the charm will install the application, ensuring that any packages and configuration files are in place, and will begin downloading and processing manpages for the configured releases.

The charm accepts only one configuration option: releases, which is a comma-separated list of Ubuntu releases to include in the manpages, which you can adjust like so:

❯ juju config ubuntu-manpages releases="questing, plucky, oracular, noble"

When a new configuration is applied, the charm will automatically update the manpages to include the new releases, and purge any releases that are present on disk from a previous configuration, but no longer specified.

To update the manpages, you can use the provided Juju Action:

❯ juju run ubuntu-manpages/0 update-manpages

The charm supports integrations with ingress/proxy services using the ingress relation. To test this:

# Deploy the charms ❯ juju deploy ubuntu-manpages ❯ juju deploy haproxy --channel 2.8/edge --config external-hostname=manpages.internal ❯ juju deploy self-signed-certificates --channel 1/edge # Create integrations ❯ juju integrate ubuntu-manpages haproxy ❯ juju integrate self-signed-certificates haproxy # Test the proxy integration ❯ curl -k -H "Host: manpages.internal" https://<haproxy-ip>/<model-name>-ubuntu-manpages

The scenario described above is demonstrated in the integration tests.

As of 2025-07-30, the deployment requirements have been observed to be the following:

• Configured releases: Jammy, Noble, Plucky, Questing
• Disk space used in the /app/www folder: 9.4GiB
• Size of a single release in that folder: ~1.7GiB (HTML) + ~750MiB (.gz manpages)
• Stats from the systemd service, on a 4 cores VM: update-manpages.service: Consumed 1d 2h 50min 47.755s CPU time, 4.7G memory peak, 0B memory swap peak.

Ubuntu Manpages Operator is open source and part of the Canonical family. We would love your help.

If you're interested, start with the contribution guide.

Ubuntu Manpages Operator is released under the GPL-3.0 license.