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.

To save time, the make targets above only proceess the files that have been changed since the previous docs build. To remove the previous docs build you can use make clean. You can also combine clean with other targets, for example, make clean html will do a complete rebuild of the docs.

Continuous Integration

Documentation builds are included in the Travis-CI continuous integration process, so you can see the results of the docs build for any pull request at https://travis-ci.org/ipython/ipython/pull_requests.