This directory contains the majority of the documentation for IPython.

The following tools are needed to build the documentation:

sphinx jsdoc

On Debian-based systems, you should be able to run:

sudo apt-get install python-sphinx npm
sudo npm install -g jsdoc@"<=3.3.0"

The documentation gets built using make, and comes in several flavors.

make html - build the API (both Javascript and Python) and narrative documentation web pages, this is the 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 rending of the API documentation. This build target skips that.

make jsapi - build Javascript auto-generated API documents.

make pdf will compile a pdf from the documentation.

You can run make help to see information on all possible make targets.