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This is pydoctor, an API documentation generator that works by static analysis.

It was written primarily to replace epydoc for the purposes of the Twisted project as epydoc has difficulties with zope.interface. If you are looking for a successor to epydoc after moving to Python 3, pydoctor might be the right tool for your project as well.

pydoctor puts a fair bit of effort into resolving imports and computing inheritance hierarchies and, as it aims at documenting Twisted, knows about zope.interface’s declaration API and can present information about which classes implement which interface, and vice versa.

Simple Usage

You can run pydoctor on your project like this:

$ pydoctor --make-html --html-output=docs/api src/mylib

For more info, Read The Docs.

Markup

pydoctor currently supports the following markup languages in docstrings:

epytext (default)

The markup language of epydoc. Simple and compact.

restructuredtext

The markup language used by Sphinx. More expressive than epytext, but also slighly more complex and verbose.

plaintext

Text without any markup.

You can select a different format using the --docformat option.

What’s New?

pydoctor 20.12.0

  • Python 3.6 or higher is required

  • There is now a user manual that can be built with Sphinx or read online on Read the Docs; this is a work in progress and the online version will be updated between releases

  • Added support for Python language features:

    • Type annotations of function parameters and return value are used when the docstring does not document a type

    • Functions decorated with @property or any other decorator with a name ending in “property” are now formatted similar to variables

    • Coroutine functions (async def) are included in the output

    • Keyword-only and position-only parameters are included in the output

  • Output improvements:

    • Type names in annotations are hyperlinked to the corresponding documentation

    • Styling changes to make the generated documentation easier to read and navigate

    • Private API is now hidden by default on the Module Index, Class Hierarchy and Index of Names pages

    • The pydoctor version is included in the “generated by” line in the footer

  • All parents of the HTML output directory are now created by pydoctor; previously it would create only the deepest directory

  • The --add-package and --add-module options have been deprecated; pass the source paths as positional arguments instead

  • New option -W/--warnings-as-errors to fail your build on documentation errors

  • Linking to the standard library documentation is more accurate now, but does require the use of an intersphinx inventory (--intersphinx=https://docs.python.org/3/objects.inv)

  • Caching of intersphinx inventories is now enabled by default

  • Added a Sphinx extension for embedding pydoctor’s output in a project’s Sphinx documentation

  • Added an extra named rst for the dependencies needed to process reStructuredText (pip install -U pydoctor[rst])

  • Improved error reporting:

    • More accurate source locations (file + line number) in error messages

    • Warnings were added for common mistakes when documenting parameters

    • Clearer error message when a link target is not found

  • Increased reliability:

    • Fixed crash when analyzing from package import *

    • Fixed crash when the line number for a docstring error is unknown

    • Better unit test coverage, more system tests, started adding type annotations to the code

    • Unit tests are also run on Windows

pydoctor 20.7.2

  • Fix handling of external links in reStructuredText under Python 3

  • Fix reporting of errors in reStructuredText under Python 3

  • Restore syntax highlighting of Python code blocks

pydoctor 20.7.1

  • Fix cross-reference links to builtin types in standard library

  • Fix and improve error message printed for unknown fields

pydoctor 20.7.0

  • Python 3 support

  • Type annotations on attributes are supported when running on Python 3

  • Type comments on attributes are supported when running on Python 3.8+

  • Type annotations on function definitions are not supported yet

  • Undocumented attributes are now included in the output

  • Attribute docstrings: a module, class or instance variable can be documented by a following it up with a docstring

  • Improved error reporting: more errors are reported, error messages include file name and line number

  • Dropped support for implicit relative imports

  • Explicit relative imports (using from) no longer cause warnings

  • Dropped support for index terms in epytext (X{}); this was never supported in any meaningful capacity, but now the tag is gone

This will be the last major release to support Python 2.7 and 3.5: future major releases will require Python 3.6 or later.

Metadata

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