Get started with Sphinx and rST¶
This short tutorial introduces you to the basics of creating and editing documentation using Sphinx, a documentation generation system, and reStructuredText (rST), a documentation markup language.
It also covers using Read The Docs, a popular documentation hosting system, to publish documentation.
How it works¶
In this tutorial you jump straight in and start editing.
First you’ll explore rST in the sandbox provided by the GitHub wiki, and then you’ll make changes to the source material of the tutorial itself (by adding yourself to the Register, to show that you’ve done it).
After that, you’ll go on to create new material of your own.
Since the tutorial is created using exactly the same tools and process that it aims to help you learn, you might find some opportunities to improve the tutorial itself by proposing changes - please do.
What to do¶
Work through parts 1-4 below in sequence (if you want to jump straight to part 3, that will also work).
Parts 1 and 2 introduce the basics of rST, and show how to use GitHub’s web interface to make changes to documentation content.
Parts 3 to 5 require some basic software skills. They cover creating a documentation project from scratch, customising it and publishing it using Read the Docs. They also introduce more complex rST/Sphinx functionality.