pandemonium_engine_docs/06_community/contributing/11_building_the_manual.md

Building the manual with Sphinx

This page explains how to build a local copy of the Pandemonium manual using the Sphinx docs engine. This allows you to have local HTML files and build the documentation as a PDF, EPUB, or LaTeX file, for example.

To get started, you need to:

1. Clone the pandemonium-docs repository ( https://github.com/Relintai/pandemonium_engine-docs/ ).
2. Install Sphinx ( https://www.sphinx-doc.org/ )
3. To build the docs as HTML files, install the readthedocs.org theme ( https://github.com/snide/sphinx_rtd_theme ).
4. Install the Sphinx extensions defined in the pandemonium-docs repository ( https://github.com/Relintai/pandemonium_engine-docs/ ) requirements.txt file.

We recommend using pip ( https://pip.pypa.io ), Python’s package manager to install all these tools. It comes pre-installed with Python ( https://www.python.org/ ). Ensure that you install and use Python 3. Here are the commands to clone the repository and then install all requirements.

Note: You may need to write python3 -m pip (Unix) or py -m pip (Windows) instead of pip3. If both approaches fail, check that you have pip3 installed ( https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/installation/ ).

git clone https://github.com/Relintai/pandemonium_engine-docs.git
pip3 install -r requirements.txt

With the programs installed, you can build the HTML documentation from the root folder of this repository with the following command:

# On Linux and macOS
make html

# On Windows, you need to execute the `make.bat` file instead.
make.bat html

If you run into errors, you may try the following command:

make SPHINXBUILD=~/.local/bin/sphinx-build html

Building the documentation requires at least 8 GB of RAM to run without disk swapping, which slows it down. If you have at least 16 GB of RAM, you can speed up compilation by running:

# On Linux/macOS
make html SPHINXOPTS=-j2

# On Windows
set SPHINXOPTS=-j2 && make html

The compilation will take some time as the classes/ folder contains hundreds of files.

You can then browse the documentation by opening build/html/index.html in your web browser.

In case you of a MemoryError or EOFError, you can remove the classes/ folder and run make again. This will drop the class references from the final HTML documentation but will keep the rest intact.

Note: If you delete the classes/ folder, do not use git add . when working on a pull request or the whole classes/ folder will be removed when you commit. See #3157 ( https://github.com/Relintai/pandemonium_engine-docs/issues/3157 ) for more detail.

Alternatively, you can build the documentation by running the sphinx-build program manually:

.. code:: sh

sphinx-build -b html ./ _build

You can also specify a list of files to build, which can greatly speed up compilation:

.. code:: sh

sphinx-build -b html ./ _build classes/class_node.rst classes/class_resource.rst

Building with Sphinx and virtualenv

If you want your Sphinx installation scoped to the project, you can install sphinx-build using virtualenv. To do so, run this command from this repository's root folder:

.. code:: sh

virtualenv --system-site-packages env/
. env/bin/activate
pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Then, run make html as shown above.