sphinxserve 0.7.1

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

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. sphinxserve also upgraded its filesystem notification tool to watchdog, removing another system dependency and making the code more generic, cleaner and closer to run in other operating systems.

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

$ pip install sphinxserve

$ 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!

• Guido van Rossum and Linus Torvalds

• 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

• Holger Krekel for pytest and tox

• 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