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DocumentationRefresh a bundle after the source changes

Refresh a bundle after the source changes

Use knowledge update when the source document has been edited and you want to regenerate the bundle.

Before you start

What update does

knowledge update re-extracts from the source and overwrites the bundle directory. It is not an incremental merge:

  • Every concept file is regenerated.
  • Any concept present in the old bundle but missing from the new extraction is removed.
  • Any stale .md file in directories the serializer owns is removed.

Warning.

Hand-edited concept files are lost on update. If you need to keep manual edits, back them up first or skip this tutorial.

Steps

1. Back up any manual edits

If you have edited concept files by hand and want to preserve them, copy them out of the bundle directory now:

mkdir -p ./manual-backup
cp ./pyguide/custom-note.md ./manual-backup/

2. Run update

knowledge update https://google.github.io/styleguide/pyguide.html ./pyguide

You should see:

Updating bundle from pyguide.html...
done (3.1s)
Wrote 67 concepts to ./pyguide

The number of concepts may differ from the previous extraction if the source has gained or lost sections.

3. Inspect the changes

Use git diff if the bundle is under version control:

git diff --stat ./pyguide

Or compare directory listings:

ls ./pyguide/ > /tmp/pyguide-new.txt
ls ./pyguide/ > /tmp/pyguide-old.txt  # if you captured it earlier
diff /tmp/pyguide-old.txt /tmp/pyguide-new.txt

4. Restore manual edits (if any)

If you backed up hand-edited files in step 1 and they were not regenerated by the LLM, copy them back:

cp ./manual-backup/custom-note.md ./pyguide/

Then re-validate to make sure the bundle still passes structural checks:

knowledge create --validate https://google.github.io/styleguide/pyguide.html ./pyguide

What you learned

  • knowledge update is destructive: it rewrites the entire bundle.
  • Hand-edited files must be backed up before running update.
  • After update, re-run create --validate (or call BundleSerializer.validate()) to confirm the bundle is still well-formed.

Next steps