This tutorial will guide you through the development of a simple application based on sphinx. This is the file that controls the basics of how sphinx runs when you run a build. Python 3 i about the tutorial python is a generalpurpose interpreted, interactive, objectoriented, and highlevel programming language. Sphinx is a python project that takes in restructuredtext and outputs static web pages. This tutorial is going to describe some applications of the cmusphinx toolkit. This modified text is an extract of the original stack overflow documentation created by following contributors and released under cc bysa 3.
Sphinx, written by georg brandl and licensed under the bsd license, was originally created for the python documentation and it has excellent facilities for the documentation of software projects. However, thanks to the power of sphinx, it is really functional. You will learn how to add sphinx documentation to a python package using the example astrospam python package in this repo. Sphinx is a tool that makes it easy to create intelligent and beautiful documentation for python projects or other documents consisting of multiple restructuredtext sources, written by georg brandl. After installing atlassian confluence builder for sphinx, a sphinx project can be configured to support the confluence builder. Each tutorial at real python is created by a team of developers so that it meets our high quality standards. It was originally created for the python documentation, and it has excellent facilities.
Sphinx works with either major versions of python active today, python 2 and python 3. Python 3 is the current and recommended version, and python 2 is an unsupported python version. In this blog post, ill provide examples of how i like to set up the documentation for my python project using sphinx. Such applications could include voice control of your desktop, various automotive devices and intelligent houses. Sphinx supports the inclusion of docstrings from your modules with an extension an extension is a python module that provides additional features for sphinx projects called autodoc.
Were going to use the sphinxquickstart tool here, though its use is by no means necessary. For this tutorial we will use the sphinx format, since, as the name suggests, it is the standar format used with sphinx. It normally contains a table of contents that will link to all other pages of the documentation. Pythons elegant syntax and dynamic typing, together with its interpreted nature, make it an ideal language for scripting and rapid application.
Run sphinxquickstart in there cd docs sphinxquickstart. The stubs contain automodule directives which in turn inform sphinxbuild to invoke autodoc to do the heavy lifting of actually generating the api documentation from the docstrings of a particular module. You can view the documentation by running pythons builtin web server, opening. Let us consider a python module called template see bottom of the page. This document is meant to give a tutoriallike overview of all common tasks while using sphinx. Ive found that out of the box, i just get a screenful of importerrors from autodoc. Not yet fully migrated from the previous version, so at the moment, they are broken into two different parts.
This quick start will walk you through creating the basic configuration. Sphinx is good for larger documentation or writing projects. A simple tutorial on how to document your python project. While tools like rst2html5 that come with docutils will turn a. Sphinx can be installed usinghomebrew4,macports5, or as part of a python distribution such asanaconda6. Blocks of content are structured based on the indention level they are on. When it is used at the end of a sentence, sphinx is smart and displays one. Run sphinx quickstart in there cd docs sphinx quickstart. In order to use autodoc, you need to activate it in conf. To generate sphinx documentation select sphinx task rundebug configuration, and change it as required. Followed this link to try and generate pdf from sphinx.
This tutorial is a concise summary of other sphinx tutorials and will give you. The syntax for displaying code is when it is used at the end of a sentence, sphinx is smart and displays one. This is the index file for the documentation, or what lives at. How to create a pdfoutofsphinxdocumentationtool pdf pythonsphinx. Change the versionrelease number by setting the version and release variables. Python documentation using sphinx patricks software blog. Sphinx is much like python in this regard, but without a strong community preference for a particular number of spaces per indentation level. Latex for printable pdf versions, epub, texinfo, manual pages, plain text. You may also be interested in the very nice tutorial on how to create a customized documentation using sphinx written by the matplotlib developers.
There are several different docstring formats which one can use in order to enable sphinxs autodoc extension to automatically generate documentation. In this lesson you will learn how to quickly look at the documentation for a. An idiots guide to python documentation with sphinx and. It is easy to use and will generate html, latex, pdf, and more. Mahdi yusuf 6 lessons 17m bestpractices intermediate. Sphinx has more information about referencing python objects on their website. How to create a pdfoutofsphinxdocumentationtool stack. The focus is exclusively on technical aspects how to work with sphinx.
This document is a summary of my valueable experiences in using python decumentation sphinx with github webpage. Sphinx has come a long way since this tutorial was first offered back on a cold february day in 2010, when the most recent version available was 0. Your contribution will go a long way in helping us. With sphinx, you can autodocument this module by including the following code within a rst document. You can see this concept with our codeblock directive later. Enables a builder to generate confluencecompatible markup documentation. If you want to generate the sphinx infrastructure in a different directory, specify it in the sphinx working directory field of the python integrated tools page.
Sphinx github webpage tutorials university of tennessee. There are several more directives for documenting other types of python objects, for. Welcome to my sphinx tutorial, which is now in its fourth year at pycon. Sphinx is a documentation tool that creates html, css, and javascript files from restructured text files. You can see this concept with our codeblock directive above. It was created by guido van rossum during 1985 1990. There is a translation team in transifex of this documentation, thanks to the sphinx document translators. Cmusphinx tutorial for developers cmusphinx open source. We have a toplevel docs directory in the main project directory. For converting the old python docs to sphinx, a converter was written which can be found atthe. Documenting python projects with sphinx and read the docs. The following tutorial will provide a series of steps which will.
Pdf files can be produced using the latex builder more complicated or using the a direct pdf builder called rst2pdf see below. With sphinx installed, you can write comments in your code similar to how you would with javadoc, and it will pull in all those comments to provide a big picture. These archives contain all the content in the documentation. By properly documenting your source code, sphinx will be able to generate nice looking documentation i like html for your project. This example shows how to document your docstrings and how to interpret it within your rst document. In your docsource directory is now a python file called conf. Pydoc a celebration of documentation python tutorial. This means that it takes a bunch of source files in plain text, and generates a bunch of other awesome things, mainly html. If you are looking for an ipython version compatible with python 2.
Like perl, python source code is also available under the gnu general public license gpl. It has efficient highlevel data structures and a simple but effective approach to objectoriented programming. Sphinx is much more powerful and can be used to publish books and websites using. Writing docstrings sphinxrtdtutorial documentation. This is a tutorial introduction to quickly get you up and running with your own sphinx documentation system. Sphinx user manual, with api and configuration reference. To ease the process of getting started, sphinx provides a tool, sphinxquickstart, which will generate a documentation source directory and populate it with some defaults. Were going to use the sphinx quickstart tool here, though its use is by no means necessary. The resulting application is quite simple 1 class, 2 projects, few extension point contributions. If you have followed pep 8 guideline then you can define document structure in sphinx and start building your documentation. Install either python3sphinx python 3 or pythonsphinx python 2 using aptget. Documenting python packages with sphinx and readthedocs.
Create a directory inside your project to hold your docs. The root directory of a sphinx collection of restructuredtext document sources is called the source directory. It provides a sphinx backend that allows generating professionally typeset pdf documents machiels. Once sphinx is installed, you can proceed with setting up your first sphinx project. Well cover installing sphinx, customizing the look and feel, using custom extensions for embedding plots, inheritance diagrams, syntax highlighted ipython sessions and more. A simple tutorial on how to document your python project using.
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