Writing Docs¶
This is a rough guide to contributing to blimpy documentation.
TLDR¶
- Write docs in
.rst
or.md
- Add the name of the new docs file to
index.rst
- Preview docs by installing
sphinx
viapip
and runmake html
in thedocs/
directory - Site will update automatically after pushing to the blimpy repo
Creating a Page¶
Currently, readthedocs
is able to process two kinds of files: reStructuredText (.rst)
and Markdown (.md)
.
You can find a brief guide for reStructuredText here
and a guide for Markdown here.
The two file types are rendered equally by sphinx, so feel free to use whichever one you’re more comfortable with.
To create a new page, you can create a new file in the same directory as index.rst
. After creating the file,
add the filename of the new file to index.rst
to add a link it on the index page. The new file will also show up in the sidebar
after this.
Previewing Docs¶
The docs are rendered using sphinx
, a python package. Use pip install sphinx
to install the package.
After sphinx
is installed, you can preview your changes by running make html
in the docs/
directory.
The rendered html files will be stored in docs/_build/html
. The actual site will look exactly like the rendered
files when built.
Automatic Documentation¶
You can run sphinx-apidoc -o . ../blimpy/ -f
in blimpy/docs
to generate autodoc pages from all the python modules in blimpy.
Make sure to run this command every time a new file is added to blimpy.
Updating the Site¶
The blimpy Github repo is connected to readthedocs.org with a webhook. readthedocs will automatically update the site whenever a new commit is added to the repo.