sphinxcontrib-autoyaml

This Sphinx autodoc extension documents YAML files from comments. Documentation is returned as reST definitions, e.g.:

This document:

###
# Enable Nginx web server.
enable_nginx: true

###
# Enable Varnish caching proxy.
enable_varnish: true

would be turned into text:

enable_nginx

   Enable Nginx web server.

enable_varnish

   Enable Varnish caching proxy.

See tests/examples/output/*.yml and tests/examples/output/*.txt for more examples.

autoyaml will take into account only comments which first line starts with autoyaml_doc_delimiter.

Usage

You can use autoyaml directive, where you want to extract comments from YAML file, e.g.:

Some title
==========

Documenting single YAML file.

.. autoyaml:: some_yml_file.yml

Options

# Look for YAML files relatively to this directory.
autoyaml_root = ".."
# Character(s) which start a documentation comment.
autoyaml_doc_delimiter = "###"
# Comment start character(s).
autoyaml_comment = "#"
# Parse comments from nested structures n-levels deep.
autoyaml_level = 1
# Whether to use YAML SafeLoader
autoyaml_safe_loader = False

Installing

Issue command:

pip install sphinxcontrib-autoyaml

And add extension in your project's conf.py:

extensions = ["sphinxcontrib.autoyaml"]

Caveats

Mapping keys nested in sequences

Sequences are traversed as well, but they are not represented in output documentation. This extension focuses only on documenting mapping keys. It means that structure like this:

key:
  ###
  # comment1
  - - inner_key1: value
      ###
      # comment2
      inner_key2: value
  ###
  # comment3
  - inner_key3: value

will be flattened, so it will appear as though inner keys exist directly under key. Duplicated key documentation will be duplicated in output as well. See tests/examples/output/comment-in-nested-sequence.txt and tests/examples/output/comment-in-nested-sequence.yml to get a better understanding how sequences are processed.

Complex mapping keys

YAML allows for complex mapping keys like so:

[1, 2]: value

These kind of keys won't be documented in output, because it's unclear how they should be represented as a string.

Flow-style entries

YAML allows writing complex data structures in single line like JSON. Documentation is generated only for the first key in such entry, so this:

###
# comment
key: {key1: value, key2: value, key3: value}

would yield documentation only for key.