This directory contains the majority of the documentation for IPython.

Documentation is automatically deployed on ReadTheDocs on every push or merged Pull requests.

The documentation must be built using Python 3.

In addition to :ref:`devinstall`, the following tools are needed to build the documentation:

• sphinx
• sphinx_rtd_theme
• docrepr

In a conda environment, or a Python 3 venv, you should be able to run:

cd ipython
pip install -U -r docs/requirements.txt

The documentation gets built using make, and comes in several flavors.

make html - build the API and narrative documentation web pages, this is the default make target, so running just make is equivalent to make html.

make html_noapi - same as above, but without running the auto-generated API docs. When you are working on the narrative documentation, the most time consuming portion of the build process is the processing and rendering of the API documentation. This build target skips that.

make pdf will compile a pdf from the documentation.

You can run make help to see information on all possible make targets.

To save time, the make targets above only process the files that have been changed since the previous docs build. To remove the previous docs build you can use make clean. You can also combine clean with other make commands; for example, make clean html will do a complete rebuild of the docs or make clean pdf will do a complete build of the pdf.

Documentation builds are included in the Travis-CI continuous integration process, so you can see the results of the docs build for any pull request at https://travis-ci.org/ipython/ipython/pull_requests.