dev_docs.md

Develop and Build Documentation

To build the documentation you'll need Sphinx and a few other packages.

Setup docs dev environment

Use pip

Alternatively, it is also possible to create a virtual environment and activate it with the following commands:

# create the environment
python -m venv .

# activate the environment
source bin/activate

In the environment, install the packages:

python -m pip install -r docs/requirements.txt

Use conda

First create a conda environment named ipywidgets_docs to install all the necessary packages:

# create the environment
conda create -n ipywidgets_docs -c conda-forge python pip

Use conda to install the packages listed in docs/requirements.txt.

Then, activate the conda environment.

# activate the environment
conda activate ipywidgets_docs   # Linux and OS X
activate ipywidgets_docs         # Windows

Build the documentation

Once you have installed the required packages, you can build the docs with:

cd docs
make clean
make html

After that, the generated HTML files will be available at build/html/index.html. You may view the docs in your browser by entering the following in the terminal: open build/html/index.html. Alternatively, you can start a webserver using python3 -m http.server and navigate to http://localhost:8000/build/html/index.html.

Windows users can find make.bat in the docs folder.

You should also have a look at the Project Jupyter Documentation Guide.

Cleaning notebook output for docs

When using notebook source files to generate documentation, it's good practice to strip notebook output and metadata with nbstripout before committing the notebook. For example, the following command will strip all output from a notebook:

nbstripout docs/source/examples/Widget\ List.ipynb