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. Sphinx is a powerful documentation generator that has many great features for writing technical documentation including. This tutorial will assume that you already have a basic sphinx project set up. It has efficient highlevel data structures and a simple but effective approach to objectoriented programming. This tutorial introduces the reader informally to the basic concepts and features of the python language and system. It provides a sphinx backend that allows generating professionally typeset pdf documents machiels. Sphinx github webpage tutorials university of tennessee. This package provides a python interface to cmu sphinxbase and pocketsphinx libraries created with swig and setuptools. Sphinx can be installed usinghomebrew4,macports5, or as part of a python distribution such asanaconda6.
Python code can include documentation right inside its source code. Writing docstrings sphinxrtdtutorial documentation. Populating our documentation sphinxrtdtutorial documentation. Sphinx is a python project, so it can be installed like any other python library. The sphinx python documentation generator was originally created to build python documentation, and then it evolved into a good generalpurpose documentation creator. This is a tutorial introduction to quickly get you up and running with your own sphinx documentation system. Were going to use the sphinx quickstart tool here, though its use is by no means necessary.
Sphinx uses restructuredtext markup syntax with some additions to provide document control. Please enter values for the following settings just press enter to accept a default value, if one is given in brackets. Sphinx is much more powerful and can be used to publish books and websites using. Sphinx has more information about referencing python objects on their website. The documentation is split into multiple files, written in restructured text, and is shipped together with some other configuration and media files for sphinx. The user is meant to use the provided makefile to export the documentation in various formats. Documenting your project using sphinx python hosted.
Downloads pdf html on read the docs project home builds free. Once sphinx is installed, you can proceed with setting up your first sphinx project. If you are looking for an ipython version compatible with python 2. 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. Python documentation using sphinx patricks software blog. To ease the process of getting started, sphinx provides a tool, sphinx quickstart, which will generate a documentation source directory and populate it with some defaults. After installing atlassian confluence builder for sphinx, a sphinx project can be configured to support the confluence builder.
This tutorial is going to describe some applications of the cmusphinx toolkit. It converts restructuredtext markup language into a range of output formats including html, latex for printable pdf versions, manual pages, and plain text there is also great, free hosting for your sphinx docs. It is easy to read and write because it is just regular text and all you need is a simple text editor. Jun 17, 2018 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. Enables a builder to publish to a confluence instance. To make sure you have python and a valid version, run the command in listing 1. The current version supports the following engines and apis. Python is also suitable as an extension language for customizable applications. Such applications could include voice control of your desktop, various automotive devices and intelligent houses. This modified text is an extract of the original stack overflow documentation created by following contributors and released under cc bysa 3.
This tutorial is a concise summary of other sphinx tutorials and will give you a quick overview of what sphinx can do for you. Apr 26, 2020 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. Sphinx is a tool that makes it easy to create intelligent and beautiful documentation, written by georg brandl and licensed under the bsd license. Once you have a virtualenv set up, you can install autoapi with the command. In other circumstances, we might want to generate a pdf or an ebook. Run sphinx quickstart in there cd docs sphinx quickstart. How to create a pdfoutofsphinxdocumentationtool stack. Sphinx is a documentation tool that creates html, css, and javascript files from restructured text files. Built with sphinx using a theme provided by read the docs. Documenting python packages with sphinx and readthedocs. Write documentation once, output multiple formats with sphinx. It is especially wellsuited to creating technical documentation, with support for images, crossreferencing, automatic indices, flexible tables of contents, citations, and footnotes. First, create a doc directory at the root level and cd into that directory sphinx s quick start program will give you an option to make makefile and a windows.
Custom sphinx directives are used to show jupyter notebook code cells and of course their results in both html and latex output. We have a toplevel docs directory in the main project directory. You will learn how to add sphinx documentation to a python package using the example astrospam python package in this repo. You can configure it with commit hooks to your source repository so that. Building and uploading your sphinx docs to pypi an. If you have followed pep 8 guideline then you can define document structure in sphinx and start building your documentation. May 09, 2020 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. You can see this concept with our codeblock directive above. This tutorial is a concise summary of other sphinx tutorials and will give you. Followed this link to try and generate pdf from sphinx. The syntax for displaying code is when it is used at the end of a sentence, sphinx is smart and displays one. It has become common nowadays that python projects provide their documentation in source form. 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. Well cover installing sphinx, customizing the look and feel, using custom extensions for embedding plots, inheritance diagrams, syntax highlighted ipython sessions and more.
To generate sphinx documentation select sphinx task rundebug configuration, and change it as required. Mahdi yusuf 6 lessons 17m bestpractices intermediate. Documenting python projects with sphinx and read the docs. It was originally created for the python documentation, and it has excellent facilities for the documentation of software projects in a range of languages. If you are not sure how to do this, you can follow the getting started guide in the sphinx documentation the recommended way of installing autoapi is through a virtualenv. Jupyter notebook tools for sphinx nbsphinx version 0. This is the index file for the documentation, or what lives at. Create a directory inside your project to hold your docs. Enables a builder to generate confluencecompatible markup documentation. Python project documentation overview python tutorials.
The root directory of a sphinx collection of restructuredtext document sources is called the source directory. In your docsource directory is now a python file called conf. Sphinx is much like python in this regard, but without a strong community preference for a particular number of spaces per indentation level. You can use restructuredtext or markdown to write documentation. A thorough syntax guide for restructured text rest and how it is used within sphinx can be found here. Generate web pages, printable pdfs, documents for ereaders epub, and more all from the same sources. Getting started with sphinx sphinx is a powerful documentation generator that has many great features for writing technical documentation including. How to create a pdfoutofsphinxdocumentationtool pdf pythonsphinx. When documenting python code, it is common to put a lot of documentation in the source files, in documentation strings. Sphinx is far and away the most popular python documentation tool. This is the file that controls the basics of how sphinx runs when you run a build.
Despite it being written in plaintext, it is powerful enough to create professional technical documentation, books, and websites. For this tutorial we will use the sphinx format, since, as the name suggests, it is the standar format used with sphinx. It is neither affiliated with stack overflow nor official pythonsphinx. It knows about standard ipython prompts, and extracts the input and output lines. In this blog post, ill provide examples of how i like to set up the documentation for my python project using sphinx. In this tutorial, ill be using sphinx and rinohtype to produce an html and pdf documentation. First, create a doc directory at the root level and cd into that directory sphinxs quick start program will give you an option to make makefile and a windows. By properly documenting your source code, sphinx will be able to generate nice looking documentation i like html for your project. There are several different docstring formats which one can use in order to enable sphinx s autodoc extension to automatically generate documentation.
In this video series well cover creating python documentation from scratch using sphinx, as well as getting your code repository hooked up to read the docs, to automatically build and publish your code. Python speech recognition running with sphinx speechrecognition is a library for speech recognition as the name suggests, which can work with many speech engines and apis. A simple tutorial on how to document your python project. Python tutorials indepth articles and tutorials video courses stepbystep video lessons quizzes check your learning progress learning paths guided study plans for accelerated learning community learn with other pythonistas topics focus on a. Its similar to markdown in a lot of ways, if you are already familiar with markdown. In this video series well cover creating python documentation from scratch using sphinx, as well as getting your code repository hooked up to read the docs, to automatically build and publish your code documentation. All the content is extracted from stack overflow documentation, which is written by many hardworking individuals at stack overflow. The inputs will be fed to an embedded ipython interpreter and the outputs from that interpreter will be inserted as well. Pydoc a celebration of documentation python tutorial. Python 3 is the current and recommended version, and python 2 is an unsupported python version. Tutorial this section of ipython documentation will walk you through most of the ipython functionality. The following tutorial will provide a series of steps which will. 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.
To download an archive containing all the documents for this version of python in one of various formats, follow one of links in this table. In this lesson you will learn how to quickly look at the documentation for a. Sphinx, along with tox, makes it easy to write and beautiful to look at. Sphinx user manual, with api and configuration reference. It is easy to use and will generate html, latex, pdf, and more. If you want to know about the sphinx details then have a look at useful links and atoneor theothertutorial. Python s elegant syntax and dynamic typing, together with its interpreted nature, make it an ideal language for scripting and rapid application. These archives contain all the content in the documentation. The focus is exclusively on technical aspects how to work with sphinx. Sphinx is an awesome python documentation package, and it has excellent facilities for the.
This quick start will walk you through creating the basic configuration. A simple tutorial on how to document your python project using. When it is used at the end of a sentence, sphinx is smart and displays one. Blocks of content are structured based on the indention level they are on. Sphinx is a python documentation generator, it was created to generate the python documentation, so it is a very complete tool. Sphinx works with either major versions of python active today, python 2 and python 3. In short, the underline is used to denote page titles in this case we have two, since it is our index, but it is good practice to have one title per. While tools like rst2html5 that come with docutils will turn a. It normally contains a table of contents that will link to all other pages of the documentation. Generate sphinx documentation python documentation generator. You can see this concept with our codeblock directive later. This python document generator uses restructuredtest as its markup language. Sphinx is good for larger documentation or writing projects.
Welcome to my sphinx tutorial, which is now in its fourth year at pycon. Since sphinx is available on the python package index, it can be installed using pip. This article will focus on generating sphinx documentation as automatic as possible, allowing to generate documentation out of your pydoc. Change the versionrelease number by setting the version and release variables. The ipython directive is a stateful ipython shell for embedding in sphinx documents.
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