You may already have sphinx sphinx installed -- you can check by doing:
python -c 'import sphinx'
If that fails grab the latest version of and install it with:
> sudo easy_install -U Sphinx
Now you are ready to build a template for your docs, using sphinx-quickstart:
> sphinx-quickstart
accepting most of the defaults. I choose "sampledoc" as the name of my project. cd into your new directory and check the contents:
home:~/tmp/sampledoc> ls Makefile _static conf.py _build _templates index.rst
The index.rst is the master ReST for your project, but before adding anything, let's see if we can build some html:
make html
If you now point your browser to :file:`_build/html/index.html`, you should see a basic sphinx site.
Now we will start to customize out docs. Grab a couple of files from the web site or git. You will need :file:`getting_started.rst` and :file:`_static/basic_screenshot.png`. All of the files live in the "completed" version of this tutorial, but since this is a tutorial, we'll just grab them one at a time, so you can learn what needs to be changed where. Since we have more files to come, I'm going to grab the whole git directory and just copy the files I need over for now. First, I'll cd up back into the directory containing my project, check out the "finished" product from git, and then copy in just the files I need into my :file:`sampledoc` directory:
home:~/tmp/sampledoc> pwd /Users/jdhunter/tmp/sampledoc home:~/tmp/sampledoc> cd .. home:~/tmp> git clone https://github.com/matplotlib/sampledoc.git tutorial Cloning into 'tutorial'... remote: Counting objects: 87, done. remote: Compressing objects: 100% (43/43), done. remote: Total 87 (delta 45), reused 83 (delta 41) Unpacking objects: 100% (87/87), done. Checking connectivity... done home:~/tmp> cp tutorial/getting_started.rst sampledoc/ home:~/tmp> cp tutorial/_static/basic_screenshot.png sampledoc/_static/
The last step is to modify :file:`index.rst` to include the
:file:`getting_started.rst` file (be careful with the indentation, the
"g" in "getting_started" should line up with the ':' in :maxdepth:
Contents: .. toctree:: :maxdepth: 2 getting_started.rst
and then rebuild the docs:
cd sampledoc make html
When you reload the page by refreshing your browser pointing to :file:`_build/html/index.html`, you should see a link to the "Getting Started" docs, and in there this page with the screenshot. Voila!
We can also use the image directive in :file:`index.rst` to include to the screenshot above with:
.. image:: _static/basic_screenshot.png
Next we'll customize the look and feel of our site to give it a logo, some custom css, and update the navigation panels to look more like the sphinx site itself -- see :ref:`custom_look`.