Getting Started¶
We have adopted Sphinx as the documentation engine for the KWIVER project. Sphinx’s focus on making writing documentation as easy as possible while still providing excellent support for generating documentation was espeially attractive. This project serves as an example Sphinx documented project and contains meta-documentation about how the documentation process for KWIVER projects works.
Environment¶
Sphinx is a Python based tool and requires a number of Python modules in addition to the Sphinx module itself. At the KWIVER project, we frequently use the Miniconda project from Continuum to provide out Python environment. This provides a cross-platorm (Windows, Linux and Mac OS X), consistent environment that’s easy to install and maintain.
Miniconda provides it’s own package manager, conda which can be used to install most of the packages required for Sphinx based documnetation. Conda also supports the creation of Python “sandboxes” or virtual environments. We typically keep a “Sphinx” environment available, which can be created this way:
conda create -n Sphinx sphinx sphinx_rtd_theme
Which will install the Sphinx tools (and all of Sphinx’s dependencies) and the Sphinx ReadTheDocs theme (which is the current default KWIVER theme)
Once you’ve created the Sphinx environment you activate it this way:
source activate Sphinx
Quickstart¶
Sphinx provides a command that initializes a project with a Sphinx
configuration file and stubs for some key documentation files called
sphinx-quickstart
. We create a docs
directory within our KWIVER
projects that contains these files. While you’re at it, you may wish to create a
.gitignore
file containing docs/_build
(at least) to avoid seeing the projects’
documentation build artificats in your git status
results.
When you run sphinx-quickstart in the
docs
directory it will ask a you a series of questions. In general
you’ll have to decide on the answers to may of these based on the needs of your
project but there are some key settings that are useful:
- We use
.rst
as the source file suffix - We turn on the EPub builder
- We turn on autodoc, intersphinx and viewcode
- We use
index.rst
as our anchor document
Once you’ve run sphinx-quickstart
, you can edit index.rst
to begin
writing your documentation. We find the Sphinx reStructuredText Primer to be a useful introduction to the
documentation format used by Sphinx.
For KWIVER projects, we typically edit the conf.py
file to change html_theme
to sphinx_rtd_theme
.
Preview¶
Since reStructuredText is a mark up syntax that you work with in a text editor, you will need some
means to see what your rendered documentation will look like. While you can simply run make html
in your docs
directory and open
the resulting .html
file, this can become somewhat tedious. If you install the livereload
module in your Sphinx environment (pip install livereload
should do the trick) you can use the following Python script:
from livereload import Server, shell
server = Server()
server.watch("*.rst", shell('make html', cwd='.')) #'*
server.serve(root='_build/html')
Save this in your docs
directory as sphinx_server.py
and run it with this command:
python sphinx_server.py
Then, you can browse to http://localhost:5500/
to see your
rendered documentation. The livereload
module will notice
whenever you save a new version of one of your *.rst
files and will re-run sphinx to provide an updated view of you rendered documentation.