5.4. Creating new documentation with Sphinx

This section describes how sphinx documentation can be created for your project. Typically this documentation would be generated within a code repository.

Setting up a Sphinx project

  1. Follow the quick-start instructions on the official sphinx documentation page

  2. During this process, it will ask Separate source and build directories (y/n). Select yes.

  3. You can now add new reST source files and place them in the docs/source folder.

  4. Add the filenames of these new source file to the index.rst file in the docs/source folder.

To make this process easier, we have provided a template software project on Github that you can use to get started. Download and copy the docs folder from this repository

Building Sphinx documentation

From the command line

  1. In a terminal, change directory to the folder where the sphinx documentation was generated (ie the docs folder):

cd path/to/docs

  1. Enter the following command.

make html

  1. You can then open the html version of the documentation by opening /path/to/docs/build/index.html in your browser of choice e.g. Google Chrome.

From IDEs

For more information on how to build documentation from IDEs such as PyCharm, see the Updating documentation Section of this tutorial.