Sphinx Documentation#
sudo apt-get install texmaker gummi texlive texlive-full texlive-latex-recommended latexdraw intltool-debian lacheck libgtksourceview2.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-common lmodern luatex po-debconf tex-common texlive-binaries texlive-extra-utils texlive-latex-base texlive-latex-base-doc texlive-luatex texlive-xetex texlive-lang-cyrillic texlive-fonts-extra texlive-science texlive-latex-extra texlive-pstricks
Todo
Link checking is facilitated by sphinx using
make linkcheck
(on windows)Add section on FontAwesome inline icons from
sphinx-panels
Add tutorial/ section on maintaining a bibliography in Sphinx.
Compile documentation with Sphinx#
This example is a step-by-step guide on how to compile the tudat documentation
locally on your system using sphinx
. This procedure works to compile documentation for both the tudat-space and the documentation you are currently reading.
Note
This procedure requires that Anaconda or Miniconda is installed. For information regarding the use of the conda ecosystem, please see Getting Started with Conda.
Create an environment that will be satisfy all dependencies required for building documentation, then activate it. This can be done by downloading this
environment.yaml
(yaml
), which will install thetudat-docs
conda environment.
conda env create -f environment.yaml & conda activate tudat-docs
Enter the root directory of a repository containing a
docs
directory, which contains asource
subdirectory. The following command is specific to cloning and entering thetudat-space
repository.
git clone https://github.com/tudat-team/tudat-space.git & cd tudat-space
Build the documentation using the
sphinx-build
command, specifying that html is to be built with the supplied source and output build directory.
sphinx-build -b html docs/source docs/build
View the local build of the documentation by opening the
docs/build/index.html
with your preferred browser.
Tip
[PyCharm/CLion] You can do this in by right clicking index.html
in the Project tree and selecting Open with Browser
.
Compiling Documentation in PyCharm#
If you are using PyCharm, the compilation of the documentation after each edit can be simplified by setting up a run configuration tailored for sphinx. The procedure is described below.
From the main toolbar, click on
Run > Edit Configurations
;In the window that has just opened, click on the
+
button (upper-left) to add a new configuration;From the drop-down menu, select
Python docs > Sphinx task
;
Give a name to the new run configuration;
Make sure that the field
Command
is set onhtml
;For the
input
andoutput
fields, select thesource
andbuild
folders respectively.
Make sure that the correct run configuration is selected. If so, pressing Run will be equivalent to executing the following command from the command line:
sphinx-build -b html docs/source docs/build
Troubleshooting#
In this section, we collect the most recurring bugs that can happen while using sphinx, hoping that it will save precious time to future Tudat contributors.
No changes shown in browser#
It happens often that the browser shows cached data instead of the updated html files. As a result, if you don’t see your changes, try to empty/delete the cache of your browser (see, e.g., this guide).
No changes shown in online docs#
It can happen that, after pushing your changes to the origin
repository, no changes are shown on the actual
website (e.g., on tudat-space or on this website). Some suggestions to identify the problem will follow:
Check that you pushed to the
main
branch. The documentation is built by readthedocs only if changes are pushed to that branch.Check that the build was successful. This can be monitored via the “Builds” link in the readthedocs_menu_ (see screenshot above). If the build was not successful, you can click on it and see the output of the build. This can be helpful to identify where things are going wrong.
Sphinx commands not working#
If a sphinx command does not work, for instance the following:
.. toctree::
intro
guide
it can be due to many things, but before going crazy into debugging mode, check that the amount of spaces before
intro
and guide
correspond to three empty spaces. Sphinx requires three empty spaces, but
the tab key corresponds to four empty spaces: if you use it in sphinx commands, it can generate a lot of confusion
because the extra white space will break the sphinx command and it is very difficult to notice as well.
To be clear, this will likely not work:
.. toctree::
intro
guide