User documentation

We use reStructuredText for Sphinx to generate the documentation locally and online on Read the Docs. To learn more about the syntax, check out this quick reference.

Requirements

Current working directory: nest-desktop/docs. To install Sphinx and the Read the Docs theme via pip:

python3 -m pip install sphinx sphinx_rtd_theme

Development: Build HTML locally

Build the documentation which your created with Sphinx in the docs folder offline:

rm -r ./_build; make html

Start the python server to serve the documentation locally, i.e. available only on your personal machine.

python3 -m http.server --directory ./_build/html 8002

Then open the URL http://localhost:8002 with your browser.


Publication: Push to ReadTheDocs

The documentation files for the dev branch are automatically rebuilt (and updated) each time a push is made to the repository. The docs for other versions depend on the GitHub tags. The latest tags refers to the latest release version.


Optional: Use Singularity

Build a singularity image:

singularity build doc-sphinx.sif singularity/doc-sphinx.def

Start the Singularity container:

singularity shell doc-sphinx.sif