Markdown Refdocs

Extracts docstings and type annotations from a python package to generate reference documentation in markdown. See an example of this at: https://creisle.github.io/markdown_refdocs/

Getting Started

Install the package from pip

pip install markdown_refdocs

Run this from the command line or import the function to get the markdown returns as strings and customize. This tool has the customary help manu you can view with the -h option to see the options documentation

markdown_refdocs -h

Generate markdown reference documentation from your python package like so

markdown_refdocs /path/to/python/package -o /path/to/output/dir

This will generate markdown files under /path/to/output/dir which can be used standalone or incorporated in a Mkdocs build

Examples

Documentation for this package itself can be generated using this tool itself

markdown_refdocs markdown_refdocs -o docs/reference

This will build the following files (1 file per python sub-module)

docs/reference/
└── markdown_refdocs
    ├── links.md
    ├── main.md
    ├── markdown.md
    ├── parsers.md
    └── types.md

See a live demo of this under: https://creisle.github.io/markdown_refdocs

Features

• parses google-style docstrings
• generates markdown output (this allows the user to link into the navigation or their main docs)
• can take package directories as input
• reads type annotations
• pulls function signatures

Limitations

• currently only supports google-style docstrings. May add support for others later if requested.

Motivation

The motivation for this package was that writing docs in markdown is simpler to read and write than writing them in RST. There is an awesome package called Mkdocs for turning your markdown documents into a static site. It has a number of plugins which extract docstrings from python files, however none of them are able to use the google docstring format which I prefer. If you're using a different docstring format you can check them out here on the Mkdocs plugin wiki.