This technical document is in the format of reStructuredText and Markdown/CommonMark. It's generated using Sphinx.
- Install Python 3.5+ (for Sphinx).
Sphinx is a tool that makes it easy to create documentation.
Sphinx_intl is a useful tool for internationalization and localization.
-
On Windows, you should open Command Prompt (⊞Win-r and type cmd) and run the same command.
It is a good moment to create a Python virtual environment and install the required tools. For that, open a command line terminal,
cd
into the directory you just created, and run the following commands https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/guides/installing-using-pip-and-virtual-environments/#creating-a-virtual-environment:- Windows:
> cd /path/to/project > python -m venv .venv # Creating a virtual environment > .\.venv\Scripts\activate # Activating a virtual environment (.venv) > where python # ...\.venv\Scripts\python.exe (.venv) > python -m pip install sphinx sphinx_intl # Installing packages (.venv) > ... (.venv) > deactivate # Leaving the virtual environment
- Linux:
$ cd /path/to/project $ python -m venv .venv # Creating a virtual environment $ source .venv/bin/activate # Activating a virtual environment (.venv) $ which python # .../env/bin/python (.venv) $ python -m pip install sphinx sphinx_intl # Installing packages (.venv) $ ... (.venv) $ deactivate # Leaving the virtual environment
Note: venv will create a virtual Python installation in the
.venv
folder. You should exclude your virtual environment directory from your version control system using.gitignore
or similar. -
After installation, type
sphinx-build --version
on the command prompt. If everything worked fine, you will see the version number for the Sphinx package you just installed. -
Sphinx comes with a script called sphinx-quickstart that sets up a source directory and creates a default conf.py with the most useful configuration values from a few questions it asks you. To use this, run:
cd /path/to/project (.venv) $ sphinx-quickstart docs cd docs
We will be presented with a series of questions, the answer to which can depend from project to project.
Now we can see that some foldes and files have been autogenerated for us:
conf.py
: This is the file where all Sphinx configuration settings (including the settings we specified during the sphinx-quickstart setup) are specified.index.rst
: This is the file which tells Sphinx how to render our index.html page._static
: image, script, etc._build
: This is the directory where the output of any builder is stored when amake <builder>
is called.
You can use Markdown and reStructuredText in the same Sphinx project.
-
Run the following command (using Command Prompt):
(.venv) $ pip install recommonmark
-
Then in your
conf.py
:extensions = ['recommonmark'] extensions = ['sphinx.ext.autodoc']
Note: You should skip this step(2). The above code is already in you
conf.py
.
warning: Markdown doesn’t support a lot of the features of Sphinx, like inline markup and directives. However, it works for basic prose content. reStructuredText is the preferred format for technical documentation
Sphinx_rtd_theme is a html theme.
-
Run the following command (using Command Prompt):
(.venv) $ pip install sphinx_rtd_theme
-
Add this theme extension module in
conf.py
html_theme = 'alabaster'
to
# html_theme = 'alabaster' import sphinx_rtd_theme html_theme = "sphinx_rtd_theme" html_theme_path = [sphinx_rtd_theme.get_html_theme_path()]
Note: You should skip this step(2). The above code is already in you
conf.py
.
Plantuml is a library for generating UML diagrams from a simple text markup language.
-
On Windows, run the following command (using Command Prompt):
(.venv) $ pip install plantweb
You can following this command to build HTML document at docs\
:
make html
Or
.\make html
Your index.rst
has been built into index.html
in your documentation output directory (typically _build/html/index.html
). Open this file in your web browser to see your docs.
This project is released under Apache 2.0 License.