sphinxserve renders sphinx docs monitoring file changes
Project description
sphinxserve is a tool to effectively document projects
Since the internet adopted HTML, many communities are trying to find ways to write web pages in ways that can be pleasantly readable and writable. In our python community, reStructuredText and Sphinx have been created to author beautiful documentation. The goal of sphinxserve is to make them more accessible, interactive, and convenient to use.
Examples of projects using sphinx
Sphinx |
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Read The Docs |
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Projects using sphinx |
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sphinxjp.themes.revealjs |
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loadconfig |
Design considerations
sphinxserve was originally conceived as a Python and Linux project that can visualize sphinx document modifications in real time while working on them. At its core, sphinxserve uses the awesome projects gevent to provide concurrency and event coordination, flask for web communication, Sphinx for reStructucturedText rendering and of course Python. sphinxserve used to control browser reloading with xdotool, introducing a complex system tool dependency. On release 0.7, sphinxserve decouples from this system dependency using instead flask-sockets python package. The tradeoff here was to temporarily drop python3 support until the gevent ecosystem officially supports python3 which should be soon. Also, the filesystem notification tool was upgraded to watchdog, removing another system dependency and making the code more generic and cleaner. With these changes, as of release 0.7.2, sphinxserve is able to run in other platforms as Windows for example.
Installation
sphinxserve can be installed either as a python package, or as a docker application. On linux, it can also be installed as a pex python executable
Python executable (PEX)
This is the easiest (no compilation or fancy tooling needed) and smallest (~9 MB) way to install sphinxserve using the excellent PEX tool. In itself, it is a zipfile containing all python package dependencies and only requires the python interpreter. This pex is verified to work at least on Debian>=7, Ubuntu>=14, Centos>=7 and Arch distros.
System dependencies: glibc linux>=3, python>=2.7,<3 and a web browser supporting websockets (Firefox, Chrome, etc):
$ wget -O ~/bin/sphinxserve https://github.com/mzdaniel/sphinxserve/releases/download/0.7.1/sphinxserve $ chmod 755 ~/bin/sphinxserve
Python package
Linux system dependencies: glibc linux>=3, python>=2.7,<3, the C toolchain (package names dependent on linux distro) to compile gevent and a web browser supporting websockets. pip automatically downloads sphinxserve and its python dependencies, compiles and builds wheel binary packages as needed and finally install sphinxserve.
Windows system dependencies: Verified to work on Windows 7, python >=2.7,<3 and a web browser supporting websockets with just pip installing.
In all systems:
$ pip install sphinxserve
Docker application
Docker is an extraordinary tool that simplifies the entire dependency tree by including it in a system image. This makes the installation experience much more pleasant and the ability to run on OSX, Windows and Linux with the same image, assuming proper setup of the docker network and volume. Another advantage is that a running image cannot see your filesystem by default. Sharing directories and which ones is an explicit setup. This method is verified to work on Linux so far.
System dependencies: docker and a web browser supporting websockets.
This installation command automatically downloads sphinxserve image (~40 MB) and creates a small shell script ~/bin/sphinxserve that simplifies the running interface with the following command:
$ docker run mzdaniel/sphinxserve install | bash
Launching
Assumming your sphinx project is in ~/docproj (containing conf.py) and ~/bin is in your shell $PATH:
$ sphinxserve ~/docproj
Workflow
After launching sphinxserve, it will build the sphinx pages and serve them by default on localhost:8888. Any saved changes on rst or txt files will trigger docs rebuild.
Working in a Restructured text project
Lets put together all the pieces. A sphinx project needs at minimum 2 files: the project file conf.py and a restructuredtext (rst) index file index.rst:
cat > conf.py << EOF master_doc = 'index' EOF cat > index.rst << 'EOF' My awesome sphinx project ========================= This is my first attempt to use `My awesome sphinx project`_ EOF
At this point we can browse our project on localhost:8888 with just:
sphinxserve
Thanks!
Georg Brandl & David Goodger for Sphinx and reStructuredText
Denis Bilenko, Armin Rigo & Christian Tismer for Gevent and Greenlet
Armin Ronacher for Flask
Jeffrey Gelens & Kenneth Reitz for gevent websocket and flask sockets
Yesudeep Mangalapilly for watchdog
Eric Holscher for Read The Docs
Brian Wickman for PEX
Mark Otto, Jacob Thornton & Ryan Roemer for Bootstrap sphinx bootstrap
Hakim El Hattab & tell-k for Revealjs and sphinx revealjs
Solomon Hykes, Jerome Petazzoni and Sam Alba for Docker
The awesome Python, Linux and Git communities
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