Get started with Sphinx¶

If your repository uses Sphinx to create nicely rendered documentation, you will need to set up Sphinx on your machine. This requires a small chain of steps that are needed to install other things, so you’ll need to run through these steps in this order.

Install Python¶

If you recently updated your machine (with the command sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade), Python3 may already be installed, but we can check that by running the following command:

python3 --version

If Python3 isn’t there, you can run the following command to install it:

sudo apt install python3

Install pip¶

Pip often comes installed with Python, but not always. Check if it’s installed by running:

pip --version

If it’s not installed already, run:

sudo apt install python3-pip

Install Sphinx¶

Now you have pip installed, you can use it to install Sphinx (and that’s the end of our chain!) with the following:

pip install sphinx

You will probably also need to install the Python virtual environment since it’s unlikely to be installed by default. To do this, run:

sudo apt install python3.10-venv

This command will install all of the packages that are needed to run a virtual Python environment, but may not have come already bundled with Python3.

Make a local build of your documentation¶

As you’re working on your documentation, you’ll want to check that your edits are having the desired effect.

Navigate to the open-documentation-academy folder¶

If you’ve been following along on the previous pages, you should be within a folder (possibly called src) that contains a sub-folder called open-documentation-academy. Let’s check where we are first.

Type ls on the command line to “list show” all the files and folders you have inside your current folder. If this is a fresh Ubuntu virtual machine, you probably won’t have anything yet, except for the open-documentation-academy folder that we created when we cloned the repository. Since we have that folder, you can do:

cd open-documentation-academy 

This will put you into the ODA folder that contains all of the working contents of the GitHub repository.

If you’re not sure where you are, you can run:

cd
ls
cd <directory name>

Running cd by itself will take you back to the root directory, and then you can use ls and cd to navigate to where you want to be (inside the open-documentation-academy folder).

If you’ve been following along, that will be:

cd
ls
cd src
ls
cd open-documentation-academy

Build the documentation¶

At this point, you can build the documentation (as it currently exists) on your local machine, with:

make run

If make run doesn’t work initially, then try running this sequence of commands to start with a clean build environment:

make clean
make install
make run

If it manages to complete the run successfully, you will see a big rush of commands and output flying past on your terminal window, and eventually, it will stop here:

The documentation has built successfully

This means the documentation was successfully built, and now you can view it in your web browser by right clicking on that http://127.0.0.1@8000 link and either selecting “open link” or “copy link” (which you can then paste into your browser of choice).

It’s really convenient to have this running while you’re working on your changes, because every time you save a file, it will update the build and show you a live preview of what your changes look like.

You can close the running server at any time by pressing Ctrl + C in the window where it’s running.

It’s a good idea to open a second Ubuntu tab in your Terminal Window so that you can work in one tab while the documentation can be served in the other. You can do this by clicking on the down arrow next to the currently open tab, and clicking “Ubuntu” (if you’re using WSL).