Ask HN: How do people generate documentation from Python comments?

4 pointsRPeres4 comments

We are in the process of improving our documentation for our users. I am not experienced at all in the Python ecosystem, so I would like to get some idea/suggestions on how people are generating docs from python comments. The idea is to then put the output on a website, so people can access publicly.

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It used to be that Sphinx [1] was the go-to solution, possibly something else has emerged since I was doing this sort of thing. Some example output at [2]

[1] https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/

[2] http://soliton.vm.bytemark.co.uk/pub/docs/mvpoly/

I'm in the process of setting up docs for a Python based CLI and Sphinx has continually come up as the best option. Ran through the setup today and it was straightforward, next step is figuring out how to auto-generate the docs from docstrings.

This is the source for those docs, but Makefiles and autoconf which tends to make people cross nowerdays ...

https://gitlab.com/jjg/mvpoly/-/tree/master/src/python

docutils is a lower-level system than Sphinx

https://docutils.sourceforge.io/

Note also that the "help()" function

https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html#help

reads out these comments and prints them on the interactive console.

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