4. Improve the way your project is built¶

Auto-build the documentation¶

Running make html each time you want to rebuild the documentation is tedious. It’s much more elegant to have it rebuilt for you, and refreshed in the browser automatically on each change. sphinx-autobuild will do this for you.

pip install sphinx-autobuild
sphinx-autobuild . _build/html

Your documentation is now served at http://127.0.0.1:8000.

Even better, edit the Makefile. Add:

run:
    sphinx-autobuild "$(SOURCEDIR)" "$(BUILDDIR)"

to it. Now you can start the server with make run.

Important

A Makefile uses tabs, not spaces, for indentation. If you run into an error:

Makefile:23: *** missing separator.  Stop.

you have probably indented your lines with spaces rather than a tab.

Build in spelling checks¶

sphinxcontrib-spelling will check spelling for you.

pip install sphinxcontrib-spelling

It installs PyEnchant as a dependency, which in turn requires the Enchant C library. Install this - for example (in various Linuxes):

apt-get install enchant

or (macOS with Brew):

brew install enchant

Add sphinxcontrib-spelling to your project’s extensions:

 extensions = [
     [...]
     'sphinxcontrib.spelling',
]

The default language is US English, but you can set your own, once again by editing the conf.py file:

spelling_lang = 'en_GB'

and run a spelling check:

sphinx-build -b spelling . _build

It will list what it thinks are misspelled words. Add false positives that it should ignore to the project’s dictionary, spelling_wordlist.txt.

You can also add a make spelling command to the Makefile:

spelling:
    sphinx-build -b spelling "$(SOURCEDIR)" "$(BUILDDIR)"

Make your documentation easier for others to use¶

You probably want other people to be able to work on your documentation too. They’ll need to set up a virtual environment for it - but you can get the Makefile to automate most of the work.

You should have a list variables being assigned near the top of the Makefile. Add a new one:

SPHINXOPTS    ?=
SPHINXBUILD   ?= sphinx-build
SOURCEDIR     = .
BUILDDIR      = _build
VENV          = sphinxenv/bin/activate

Add a new install command:

install:
    @echo "... setting up virtualenv"
    python3 -m venv sphinxenv
    . $(VENV); pip install --upgrade -r requirements.txt

    @echo "\n" \
      "--------------------------------------------------------------- \n" \
      "* watch, build and serve the documentation: make run \n" \
      "* check spelling: make spelling \n" \
      "\n" \
      "enchant must be installed in order for pyenchant (and therefore \n" \
      "spelling checks) to work. \n" \
      "--------------------------------------------------------------- \n"

Then copy all the installed Python dependencies in the virtual environment into a requirements.txt file:

pip freeze > requirements.txt

Now run:

make install

It should create the virtual environment and install all the requirements in it.

Now, we want that virtual environment to be activated for the run and spelling commands too, so edit them appropriately, so that they run their instructions inside this virtual environment:

run:
    . $(VENV); sphinx-autobuild "$(SOURCEDIR)" "$(BUILDDIR)"

spelling:
    . $(VENV); sphinx-build -b spelling "$(SOURCEDIR)" "$(BUILDDIR)"

Quieten Sphinx¶

Sphinx’s output in the console will be rather noisy - that’s because right now, it’s actually processing everything in the sphinxenv virtual environment created inside your documentation project, wholly unnecessarily.

To tell it not to, edit the exclude_patterns variable in conf.py, so that it excludes the virtual environment too:

exclude_patterns = ['_build', 'Thumbs.db', '.DS_Store', 'sphinxenv']