.. _sphinx_intro: Sphinx Introduction for LLVM Developers ======================================= This document is intended as a short and simple introduction to the Sphinx documentation generation system for LLVM developers. Quickstart ---------- To get started writing documentation, you will need to: 1. Have the Sphinx tools :ref:`installed `. 2. Understand how to :ref:`build the documentation `. 3. Start :ref:`writing documentation `! .. _installing_sphinx: Installing Sphinx ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ You should be able to install Sphinx using the standard Python package installation tool ``easy_install``, as follows:: $ sudo easy_install sphinx Searching for sphinx Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/sphinx/ Reading http://sphinx.pocoo.org/ Best match: Sphinx 1.1.3 ... more lines here .. If you do not have root access (or otherwise want to avoid installing Sphinx in system directories) see the section on :ref:`installing_sphinx_in_a_venv` . If you do not have the ``easy_install`` tool on your system, you should be able to install it using: Linux Use your distribution's standard package management tool to install it, i.e., ``apt-get install easy_install`` or ``yum install easy_install``. Mac OS X All modern Mac OS X systems come with ``easy_install`` as part of the base system. Windows See the `setuptools `_ package web page for instructions. .. _building_the_documentation: Building the documentation ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In order to build the documentation, all you should need to do is change to the ``docs`` directory and invoke make as follows:: $ cd path/to/project/docs $ make html Note that on Windows there is a ``make.bat`` command in the docs directory which supplies the same interface as the ``Makefile``. That command will invoke ``sphinx-build`` with the appropriate options for the project, and generate the HTML documentation in a ``_build`` subdirectory. You can browse it starting from the index page by visiting ``_build/html/index.html``. Sphinx supports a wide variety of generation formats (including LaTeX, man pages, and plain text). The ``Makefile`` includes a number of convenience targets for invoking ``sphinx-build`` appropriately, the common ones are: make html Generate the HTML output. make latexpdf Generate LaTeX documentation and convert to a PDF. make man Generate man pages. .. _writing_documentation: Writing documentation ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The documentation itself is written in the reStructuredText (ReST) format, and Sphinx defines additional tags to support features like cross-referencing. The ReST format itself is organized around documents mostly being readable plaintext documents. You should generally be able to write new documentation easily just by following the style of the existing documentation. If you want to understand the formatting of the documents more, the best place to start is Sphinx's own `ReST Primer `_. Learning More ------------- If you want to learn more about the Sphinx system, the best place to start is the Sphinx documentation itself, available `here `_. .. _installing_sphinx_in_a_venv: Installing Sphinx in a Virtual Environment ------------------------------------------ Most Python developers prefer to work with tools inside a *virtualenv* (virtual environment) instance, which functions as an application sandbox. This avoids polluting your system installation with different packages used by various projects (and ensures that dependencies for different packages don't conflict with one another). Of course, you need to first have the virtualenv software itself which generally would be installed at the system level:: $ sudo easy_install virtualenv but after that you no longer need to install additional packages in the system directories. Once you have the *virtualenv* tool itself installed, you can create a virtualenv for Sphinx using:: $ virtualenv ~/my-sphinx-install New python executable in /Users/dummy/my-sphinx-install/bin/python Installing setuptools............done. Installing pip...............done. $ ~/my-sphinx-install/bin/easy_install sphinx ... install messages here ... and from now on you can "activate" the *virtualenv* using:: $ source ~/my-sphinx-install/bin/activate which will change your PATH to ensure the sphinx-build tool from inside the virtual environment will be used. See the `virtualenv website `_ for more information on using virtual environments.