docs/README.rst

IPython Documentation
---------------------

This directory contains the majority of the documentation for IPython.


Deploy docs
-----------

Documentation is automatically deployed on ReadTheDocs on every push or merged
Pull requests.


Requirements
------------

The documentation must be built using Python 3.

The following tools are needed to build the documentation:

 - sphinx
 - sphinx_rtd_theme

On Debian-based systems, you should be able to run::

    sudo apt-get install python3-sphinx python3-sphinx-rtd-theme

In a conda environment, you can use::

    conda install sphinx sphinx_rtd_theme

In a Python 3 ``venv``, you should be able to run::

    pip install -U sphinx sphinx_rtd_theme


Build Commands
--------------

The documentation gets built using ``make``, and comes in several flavors.

``make html`` - build the API and narrative documentation web pages, this is
the default ``make`` target, so running just ``make`` is equivalent to ``make
html``.

``make html_noapi`` - same as above, but without running the auto-generated API
docs. When you are working on the narrative documentation, the most time
consuming portion  of the build process is the processing and rending of the
API documentation. This build target skips that.

``make pdf`` will compile a pdf from the documentation.

You can run ``make help`` to see information on all possible make targets.