README.md

Documentation

We use Sphinx to generate the project's documentation. Documentation is written in reStructuredText and stored in .rst files.

We use Read the Docs (RTD) for hosting. RTD uses a web hook to build the documentation whenever we push to this repository.

Getting started

1. Sphinx should already be installed if you set up Freeseer for development, as Sphinx is listed as a dependency in dev_requirements.txt. Otherwise, install Sphinx by following the official instructions.
2. Use the reStructuredText Primer as a reference.

Autogenerated documentation from docstrings

We have the ability to include documentation from docstrings. For this to work, the docstrings must be written in correct reStructuredText. You can then use all of the usual Sphinx markup in the docstrings and it will end up correctly in the documentation.

Together with hand-written documentation, this technique eases the pain of having to maintain two locations for documentation, while at the same time avoiding auto-generated-looking pure API documentation.

We currently use this for plugins (see the userguide in the docs), and plan on doing the same for more of our modules.

Build & preview your changes locally

Once you've made your changes to the documentation, rebuild the HTML output.

$ cd docs/
$ make clean # Optional. Removes the build/ directory. Use if experiencing issues due to Sphinx's cache.
$ make html

The updated HTML files will be in docs/build/html/. There are two ways to view the built documentation locally:

• Open any of the HTML files in docs/build/html/ with your web browser
• Or serve the contents of docs/build/html/ from a local server
  E.g. run python -m SimpleHTTPServer from docs/build/html and navigate your browser to localhost:8000

You can view the underlying reStructuredText of any page built with Sphinx by clicking the "Show Source" link on such a page.