Updating man pages?

[stanl]

Using pkg_add I installed node so that I could then use npm to install a program called ntbk
(https://michaelsoolee.com/ntbk-journal/).
Everything worked fine and at the end suggestion was made to add:
/usr/local/lib/node-modules/npm/man
and:
/usr/local/lib/node-modules/sshpk/man
to /etc/man.conf.

But now if I do man npm or man sshpk I'm told there is no entry for npm in the manual.
I tried makewhatis but I;m not sure if that is what I need.

Thanks

[J65nko]

I assume that you first copied /etc/examples/man.conf to /etc/? And then added those two lines so you now have something like this?

manpath /usr/share/man
manpath /usr/X11R6/man
manpath /usr/local/man

# node.js related man pages

manpath /usr/local/lib/node-modules/npm/man
manpath /usr/local/lib/node-modules/sshpk/man

And then ran # makewhatis?

I just created a test man page file hierarchy as user snap2 and copied two man pages from another system:

snap2[~]mkdir -p man/man1

snap2[~/man/man1]scp siralas.nl:spip\* .
spipe.1                                       100% 2790   307.2KB/s   00:00    
spiped.1                                      100% 5089   532.1KB/s   00:00    
snap2[~/man/man1]ls -l
total 24
-r--r--r--  1 snap2  snap2  2790 Jun  8 01:04 spipe.1
-r--r--r--  1 snap2  snap2  5089 Jun  8 01:04 spiped.1

As root in another xterm added the following line to /etc/man.conf

# test
/home/snap2/man

An attempt to view the man page succeeded but showed the recommendation to update mandoc.db:

snap2[~]man spiped
man: outdated mandoc.db lacks spiped(1) entry, run makewhatis /home/snap2/man

Ran # makewhatis and then I could view the man page without the mandoc.db warning.
After running that command:

ls -lR /home/snap2/man 
/home/snap2/man:
total 16
drwxr-xr-x  2 snap2  snap2  512 Jun  8 01:04 man1
-rw-r--r--  1 root   snap2  452 Jun  8 01:47 mandoc.db

/home/snap2/man/man1:
total 24
-r--r--r--  1 snap2  snap2  2790 Jun  8 01:04 spipe.1
-r--r--r--  1 snap2  snap2  5089 Jun  8 01:04 spiped.1

[stanl]

You assume incorrectly, giving me more credit than I deserve.
I was not aware of /etc/examples/man.conf. My guess is that I installed some program which advised me to add /path/to/some/file/man to /etc/man.conf.
So, I created /etc/man.conf and added /path/to/some/file/man and never included "manpath" at the beginning of the line.

I've since corrected it following your example. Now the man page for npm shows up but several other man pages in /etc/man.conf still don't. I'm not overly concerned about this as I doubt I'll ever need to read the man page for tk8.6 but I am curious as to why.

In any case, thank you for your assistance. I do appreciate it.