icreports 0.0.10

Utilities for generating technical reports.

icreports

icreports is a configuration management tool (à la CMake) for generating e-books and technical documents. It is used at the Irish Centre for High End Computing (ICHEC) to build the ICHEC handbook.

Features

The project is based on the Jupyter Book toolchain and formats, providing a wrapper that allows building multiple configurations of a book based on tags in document frontmatter, allowing the concept of 'public', 'private' or 'draft' versions.

In particular, it allows:

• Rendering of different book versions (e.g. public, private, draft) based on document frontmatter tags
• Automatic conversion of image formats (including TIKZ) to best suit the output format (web, PDF etc).
• Named build configurations specified in YAML, allowing rendering of multiple versions in the same build job.
• Book version numbering

Why is this useful?

At ICHEC (at least) we want a handbook that is as easy as possible to contribute to. But the people who maintain the handbook don't have easy access to the centre's hosting infrastructure - so it isn't easy to 'self-host' web services that we need. Ideally we live in a DevOps world where this is possible - but we aren't there yet. This library sidesteps this by relying on public infrastructure like ReadTheDocs to do the document build and hosting. However, we want 'internal' info in the handbook too. The convoluted steps needed to maintain public and internal handbook versions while also building on piecemeal public infrastructures motivated this tool. Maybe you are in a similar situation and it can be helpful for you too.

Usage

Assuming a repository has been set up for a standard Jupyter Book build, to use icreports you can add some build configurations to the existing _config.yml under an icreports key, for example:

title: Mock Book
author: Mock Book Author
exclude_patterns: [/src/media, infra/, infra/README.md, _build, .venv]
only_build_toc_files: true
sphinx:
  config:
    myst_heading_anchors: 3
latex:
  latex_documents:
     targetname: book.tex
icreports:
  project_name: mock_book
  version: 0.0.0
  builds:
    - name: "internal"
      outputs:
        - "pdf"
        - "html"
        - "src"
    - name: "public"
      outputs:
        - "pdf"
        - "html"
        - "src"
      include_tags:
        - "public"

here the book is given a version and two builds 'internal' and 'public' are specified. The public build will only include documents that have the tag 'public' in their frontmatter, through the use of the 'include_tags' attribute. All supported output formats 'pdf', 'html' and 'src' (just copy all sources) are requested in this case. This will lead to four invocations of Jupyter Book (and two custom copy operations for 'src').

To do the builds run:

icreports book --source_dir $SOURCE_DIR 

where SOURCE_DIR is the location of the book sources.

Installation

The project is available on PyPi, you can install it with:

pip install icreports

Some features rely on converting images between various formats. For full image format support imagemagick, cairo and a full LaTeX environment are required. On Mac you can install the former with brew, with MacTeX used to install the LaTeX environment.

Using a container

If you prefer not to set up the dependencies or are having issues with them you can use a container to do the build. Assuming you have podman or docker installed you can do:

cd infra
podman build --platform linux/arm64 -t icreports .
podman run -it -v $SOURCE_DIR:/src -v $BUILD_DIR/:/build -p 8000:8000 --platform linux/arm64 icreports

The SOURCE_DIR is the path to the book sources on the host. The BUILD_DIR is somewhere you want build output to go on the host. --platform can be omitted on x86_64 systems.

Build output will also be served at localhost:8000, which you can open in a web browser.

Contact

For further information you can contact [e-mail]. Due to our current Gitlab hosting setup we can't easily accept contributions or defect reports via that platform. We may in future set up a mirror if of interest - please get in touch by email with any defect reports or other feedback in the meantime.

Copyright

Copyright 2024 Irish Centre for High End Computing

The software in this repository can be used under the conditions of the GPLv3+ license, which is available for reading in the accompanying LICENSE file.

If you are an ICHEC collaborator or National Service user and hope to use this library under different terms please get in touch.