Posts in "Python" category

This is Part 2 of my Sphinx autodocumentation tutorial. Part 1 of this tutorial you can find by the following link:

Autodocumenting your Python code with Sphinx - part 1

As I've mentioned in Part 1, Sphinx as an automatic documentation generator for Python is neither convenient nor simple. But it is de facto the tool for documenting Python programs and libraries, so unfortunately we have to deal with its weaknesses.

In Part 1 I've demonstrated you how to write Sphinx-compatible docstrings for your Python objects, and now I'll show you how to set-up a Sphinx project to generate documentation from your code docstrings. (...)

There are a number of Python auto-documenting tools in existence, starting with Python's built-in pydoc module. Some time ago Epydoc was a popular tool for auto-generating documentation from Python docstrings but its development was abandoned and it does not support current Python releases, though some popular Python IDEs, like PyDev for Eclipse or PyCharm still support Epytext markup language.

Now Sphinx has become de facto the standard tool for creating documentation for Python programs and libraries, and even the docs for Python itself are created with Sphinx. Docs for third-party Python libraries hosted on Read the Docs, a popular documentation hosting site, are also generated by Sphinx. (...)