yong2dayz/metadocs

The docs of your docs: manage sphinx documentations with mkdocs

• About
• Install
• Getting Started
• Usage
  • Adding a Python project
  • Manual addition of a built documentation
  • Customization
    • Useful Resources

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About

metadocs allows you to integrate several sphinx documentation projects into one Home Documentation listing them and allowing you to have cross projects documentation with mkdocs.

Any sphinx module can be used as long as make html works and the built code is in your_documentation/your_project/build.

metadocs comes with an example project and a standalone documention so you can already get started!

Default settings are that the Home Documentation will use a Material Design theme and Project Documentations will use Read The Docs's theme, to better distinguish the hierarchy. You can change that (in the global mkdocs.yml and in individual python projects' conf.py).

Install

metadocs requires python3 and mainly uses sphinx, mkdocs and watchdog as 3rd party libraries. Check out the full requirements

pip install metadocs

Getting Started

Start your Home Documentation with:

metadocs init your_home_documentation

Start the server with

metadocs serve

Optionnaly you can specify a port with metadocs serve -s your_port

You can also manually build the documentation with build:

metadocs build [FLAGS]

Flags being:

  -v, --verbose                             verbose flag (Sphinx will stay verbose)
  -A, --all                                 Build doc for all projects
  -F, --force                               force the build, no verification asked
  -o, --only_index                          only build projects listed in the Documentation's Home
  -p, --projects [PROJECTS [PROJECTS ...]]  list of projects to build

Usage

The package comes with a thorough documentation by default, which you'll see by running metadocs serve after a proper init. A Read The Docs-hosted version may arrive at some point.

The built in documentation is there to help you but is in no way necessary, you can overwrite or delete everything. There are however 2 mandatory things:

1 You have to keep this structure:

your_home_documentation/
    mkdocs.yml
    docs/ # your home documentation, listing sphinx docs
        index.md # mandatory file -> mkdocs's index
    site/
    your_project_1/
        build/ # sphinx's build directory
        source/ # sphinx's documentation source directory
        your_project_1/ # your documented code as a package
            __init__.py
            your_package_1_1/
            your_package_1_2/
            ...
    your_project_2/
        build/
        source/
        your_project_2/
            __init__.py
            your_package_2_1/
            your_package_2_2/
            ...
    ...

2 mkdocs's index.md file must have a # Projects section listing them as in the example

Also, remember to run build or serve commands from your Home Documenation's root folder (in your_home_documentation/ in the example above) otherwise you may get errors saying metadocs can't find a file.

Adding a Python project

metadocs comes with a useful autodoc command helping you easily add a new python project to your documentation.

All you have to do is put the documented (Google-style docstrings) code along the documentation in your_home_documentation/. Say it's called your_project_3. Then you just need to make a new directory called your_project_3 go there, copy your_project_3's code in there (as a package, meaning it should include a __init__.py and use autodoc:

$ pwd
/path_to_your_documentation/
$ mkdir your_project_3
$ cd your_project_3
$ cp -r path/to/your_project_3 .
$ ls
your_project_3
$ metadocs autodoc
... some prints
$ ls
Makefile    source    build    your_project_3

Under the hood, metadocs autodoc runs sphinx-quickstart, updates default values in conf.py, runs sphinx-apidoc, rearranges the created .rst files, builds the documentation with metadocs build and updates the Home Documentation's index.md file to list your_project_3.

If metadocs autodoc's default values for the sphinx documentation don't suit you, do update /path_to_your_documentation/your_project_3/source/conf.py.

Manual addition of a built documentation

If you don't want to metadocs autodoc, you may use any sphinx configuration you want. Just keep in mind that metadocs will run make html from your project's directory (so check that this works) and metadocs serve expects to find a file called index.html in a directory called build/ in your project.

Customization

You may use any other theme for instance. To use mkdocs-nature just:

pip install mkdocs-nature

Then change this in mkdocs.yaml : theme: nature and finally:

mkdocs build

Edit the global configuration in mkdocs.yaml and each project's in source/conf.py.

Useful Resources

• Mkdocs's Getting Started
• Material for Mkdocs's customization instructions
• Material for Mkdocs's supported extensions list