mkinx 0.3

Manage sphinx documentations with mkdocs

About

mkinx allows you to integrate several sphinx documentation projects into one Home Documentation listing them and allowing you to have cross projects documentation with mkdocs.

Any sphinx module can be used as long as make html works and the built code is in your_documentation/your_project/build.

mkinx comes with an example project and a standalone documention so you can already get started!

Default settings are that the Home Documentation will use a Material Design theme and Project Documentations will use Read The Docs’s theme, to better distinguish the hierarchy. You can change that (in the global mkdocs.yml and in individual python projects’ conf.py).

Install

pip install mkinx

Getting Started

Start your Home Documentation with:

mkinx init your_home_documentation

Start the server with

mkinx serve

Optionnaly you can specify a port with mkinx serve -s your_port

Or manually build the documentation with

mkinx build [FLAGS]

Flags being:

-v, --verbose                             verbose flag (Sphinx will stay verbose)
-A, --all                                 Build doc for all projects
-F, --force                               force the build, no verification asked
-o, --only_index                          only build projects listed in the Documentation's Home
-p, --projects [PROJECTS [PROJECTS ...]]  list of projects to build

Usage

The package comes with a thorough documentation by default, which you’ll see by running mkinx serve after a proper init. A Read The Docs-hosted version may arrive at some point.

The built in documentation is there to help you but is in no way necessary, you can overwrite or delete everything. There are however 2 mandatory things:

1 You have to keep this structure:

your_home_documentation/
    mkdocs.yml
    docs/ # your home documentation, listing sphinx docs
        index.md # mandatory file -> mkdocs's index
    site/
    your_project_1/
        build/ # sphinx's build directory
        source/ # sphinx's documentation source directory
        your_project_1/ # your documented code as a package
            __init__.py
            your_package_1_1/
            your_package_1_2/
            ...
    your_project_2/
        build/
        source/
        your_project_2/
            __init__.py
            your_package_2_1/
            your_package_2_2/
            ...
    ...

2 mkdocs’s index.md file must have a # Projects section listing them as in the example

Also, remember to run build or serve commands from your Home Documenation’s root folder (in your_home_documentation/ in the example above) otherwise you may get errors saying mkinx can’t find a file.

Adding a Python project

mkinx comes with a useful autodoc command helping you easily add a new python project to your documentation.

All you have to do is put the documented (Google-style docstrings) code along the documentation in your_home_documentation/. Say it’s called your_project_3. Then you just need to go there and use autodoc:

$ pwd
/path_to_your_documentation/
$ mkdir your_project_3
$ cd your_project_3
$ cp -r path/to/your_project_3 .
$ ls
your_project_3
$ mkinx autodoc
... some prints
$ ls
Makefile    source    build    your_project_3

Under the hood, mkinx autodoc runs sphinx-quickstart, updates default values to be compatible to the mkinx setting, runs sphinx-autoapi, rearranges the created .rst files, builds the documentation with mkinx build and updated the Home Documentation’s index.md file to list your_project_3.

If mkinx autodoc’s default values for the sphinx documentation don’t suit you, do update your_project_3/conf.py.

Manual addition of a built documentation

If you dont want to mkinx autodoc, you may use any sphinx configuration you want. Just keep in mind that mkinx will run make html from your project’s directory (so check that this works) and mkinx serve expects to find a file called index.html in a directory called build/ in your project.

Customization

You may use any other theme for instance. To use mkdocs-nature just:

pip install mkdocs-nature

Then change this in mkdocs.yaml : theme: nature and finally:

mkdocs build

Edit the global configuration in mkdocs.yaml and each project’s in source/conf.py.

Useful Resources

• Mkdocs’s Getting Started

• Material for Mkdocs’s customization instructions

• Material for Mkdocs’s supported extensions list