This directory contains the majority of the documentation for IPython.
Documentation is automatically deployed on ReadTheDocs on every push or merged Pull requests.
The documentation must be built using Python 3.
In addition to installing the development version, the following tools are needed to build the documentation:
- sphinx
- sphinx_rtd_theme
- docrepr
In a conda environment, or a Python 3 venv, you should be able to run:
cd ipython pip install -U -r docs/requirements.txt
The documentation gets built using make, and comes in several flavors.
make html - build the API and narrative documentation web pages, this is
the default make target, so running just make is equivalent to make
html.
make html_noapi - same as above, but without running the auto-generated API
docs. When you are working on the narrative documentation, the most time
consuming portion of the build process is the processing and rendering of the
API documentation. This build target skips that.
You can run make help to see information on all possible make targets.
To save time,
the make targets above only process the files that have been changed since the
previous docs build.
To remove the previous docs build you can use make clean.
You can also combine clean with other make commands;
for example,
make clean html will do a complete rebuild of the docs.
Documentation builds are included in the GitHub Actions continuous integration
process (see .github/workflows/docs.yml), and the documentation is built
on ReadTheDocs for every pull request, so you can preview the rendered result
from the pull request's checks.