Sphinx Developer’s Guide

Abstract

This document describes the development process of Sphinx, a documentation system used by developers to document systems used by other developers to develop other systems that may also be documented using Sphinx.

The Sphinx source code is managed using Mercurial and is hosted on BitBucket.

hg clone https://bitbucket.org/birkenfeld/sphinx

Community

sphinx-users <sphinx-users@googlegroups.com>

Mailing list for user support.

sphinx-dev <sphinx-dev@googlegroups.com>

Mailing list for development related discussions.

#sphinx-doc on irc.freenode.net

IRC channel for development questions and user support.

Bug Reports and Feature Requests

If you have encountered a problem with Sphinx or have an idea for a new feature, please submit it to the issue tracker on BitBucket or discuss it on the sphinx-dev mailing list.

For bug reports, please include the output produced during the build process and also the log file Sphinx creates after it encounters an un-handled exception. The location of this file should be shown towards the end of the error message.

Including or providing a link to the source files involved may help us fix the issue. If possible, try to create a minimal project that produces the error and post that instead.

Contributing to Sphinx

The recommended way for new contributors to submit code to Sphinx is to fork the Mercurial repository on BitBucket and then submit a pull request after committing the changes. The pull request will then need to be approved by one of the core developers before it is merged into the main repository.

Getting Started

These are the basic steps needed to start developing on Sphinx.

1. Create an account on BitBucket.

2. Fork the main Sphinx repository (birkenfeld/sphinx) using the BitBucket interface.

3. Clone the forked repository to your machine.

   hg clone https://bitbucket.org/USERNAME/sphinx-fork
   cd sphinx-fork
   

4. Checkout the appropriate branch.

   For changes that should be included in the next minor release (namely bug fixes), use the stable branch.

   hg checkout stable
   

   For new features or other substantial changes that should wait until the next major release, use the default branch.

5. Optional: setup a virtual environment.

   virtualenv ~/sphinxenv
   . ~/sphinxenv/bin/activate
   pip install -e .
   

6. Hack, hack, hack.

   For tips on working with the code, see the Coding Guide.

7. Test, test, test. Possible steps:

   • Run the unit tests:

     pip install nose mock
     make test
     

   • Build the documentation and check the output for different builders:

     cd doc
     make clean html latexpdf
     

   • Run the unit tests under different Python environments using tox:

     pip install tox
     tox -v
     

   • Add a new unit test in the tests directory if you can.

   • For bug fixes, first add a test that fails without your changes and passes after they are applied.

8. Please add a bullet point to CHANGES if the fix or feature is not trivial (small doc updates, typo fixes). Then commit:

   hg commit -m '#42: Add useful new feature that does this.'
   

   BitBucket recognizes certain phrases that can be used to automatically update the issue tracker.

   For example:

   hg commit -m 'Closes #42: Fix invalid markup in docstring of Foo.bar.'
   

   would close issue #42.

9. Push changes to your forked repository on BitBucket.

   hg push
   

10. Submit a pull request from your repository to birkenfeld/sphinx using the BitBucket interface.

11. Wait for a core developer to review your changes.

Core Developers

The core developers of Sphinx have write access to the main repository. They can commit changes, accept/reject pull requests, and manage items on the issue tracker.

You do not need to be a core developer or have write access to be involved in the development of Sphinx. You can submit patches or create pull requests from forked repositories and have a core developer add the changes for you.

The following are some general guidelines for core developers:

• Questionable or extensive changes should be submitted as a pull request instead of being committed directly to the main repository. The pull request should be reviewed by another core developer before it is merged.
• Trivial changes can be committed directly but be sure to keep the repository in a good working state and that all tests pass before pushing your changes.
• When committing code written by someone else, please attribute the original author in the commit message and any relevant CHANGES entry.
• Using Mercurial named branches other than default and stable is not encouraged.

Locale updates

The parts of messages in Sphinx that go into builds are translated into several locales. The translations are kept as gettext .po files translated from the master template sphinx/locale/sphinx.pot.

Sphinx uses Babel to extract messages and maintain the catalog files. It is integrated in setup.py:

• Use python setup.py extract_messages to update the .pot template.
• Use python setup.py update_catalog to update all existing language catalogs in sphinx/locale/*/LC_MESSAGES with the current messages in the template file.
• Use python setup.py compile_catalog to compile the .po files to binary .mo files and .js files.

When an updated .po file is submitted, run compile_catalog to commit both the source and the compiled catalogs.

When a new locale is submitted, add a new directory with the ISO 639-1 language identifier and put sphinx.po in there. Don’t forget to update the possible values for language in doc/config.rst.

The Sphinx core messages can also be translated on Transifex. There exists a client tool named tx in the Python package “transifex_client”, which can be used to pull translations in .po format from Transifex. To do this, go to sphinx/locale and then run tx pull -f -l LANG where LANG is an existing language identifier. It is good practice to run python setup.py update_catalog afterwards to make sure the .po file has the canonical Babel formatting.

Coding Guide

• Try to use the same code style as used in the rest of the project. See the Pocoo Styleguide for more information.
• For non-trivial changes, please update the CHANGES file. If your changes alter existing behavior, please document this.
• New features should be documented. Include examples and use cases where appropriate. If possible, include a sample that is displayed in the generated output.
• When adding a new configuration variable, be sure to document it and update sphinx/quickstart.py if it’s important enough.
• Use the included utils/check_sources.py script to check for common formatting issues (trailing whitespace, lengthy lines, etc).
• Add appropriate unit tests.

Debugging Tips

• Delete the build cache before building documents if you make changes in the code by running the command make clean or using the sphinx-build -E option.
• Use the sphinx-build -P option to run Pdb on exceptions.
• Use node.pformat() and node.asdom().toxml() to generate a printable representation of the document structure.
• Set the configuration variable keep_warnings to True so warnings will be displayed in the generated output.
• Set the configuration variable nitpicky to True so that Sphinx will complain about references without a known target.
• Set the debugging options in the Docutils configuration file.