Example: Docs as Code with Sphinx

Docs-as-code (also known as "Documentation as Code") refers to the concept of treating documentation as a codebase, i.e. integrating the documentation process in the toolchains and workflows used by software development teams.

Docs-as-code involves using version control systems such as Git for your documentation projects and authoring your content with plain text markup languages such as Markdown or reStructuredText, among other things.

To find out more about docs-as-code, head over to its website.

Whether you are a single technical communicator or a member of a larger documentation team, you can perfectly apply the docs-as-code approach to your documentation projects.

This guide will show you how to implement docs-as-code on a Linux machine using Sphinx as a documentation generator, Git as a version control system and Codeberg Pages as static site hosting.

Building documentation with Sphinx

Initially developed to generate Python documentation, Sphinx is now widely used by technical communicators and software developers to create technical and software documentation.

Sphinx uses reStructuredText as a markup language to generate documentation content. Among further advantages, Sphinx allows you to produce your documentation in different formats, including HTML, LaTeX and ePub. You can also use one of the multiple extensions developed by the community to extend its functionality.

Setting up the project

To begin setting up your project, you will first need an account on Codeberg. If you don't already have one, follow the instructions provided under Your First Steps on Codeberg.

This guide assumes that you already have Git installed on your machine. If you don't, you can install git as described in the article Install Git.

For the purpose of this guide, we will start a documentation project from scratch using an empty repository. To create a new empty repository and clone it to your local workspace, follow the steps described in the article Your First Repository as well as the instructions provided under "Option A: Clone the newly created, empty repository" within the same article.

Creating a Python virtual environment

A "virtual" isolated environment comes in very handy to eliminate the risk of any broken dependencies while working on your projects. In other words, setting up a virtual environment for your project allows you to run an instance of the Python interpreter with a particular package set and a specific configuration while ensuring compatibility between all these components inside that environment.

Before starting, you should make sure that you have pip and Python 3 installed on your machine. To check, type the following commands in your terminal:

$ pip --version
$ python3 --version

If pip and Python are not installed on your Linux machine, please follow the steps described in the articles pip Installation and Installing Python 3 on Linux respectively.

Depending on your Python version, you will need to install a compatible virtual environment manager, i.e. either "venv" for Python >= 3.3, or "virtualenv" for older Python versions.

The next step is to create a virtual environment. To do so, navigate to the folder where you have cloned the repository described under the section Setting up the project:

$ cd ~/repositories/foobar
$ python3 -m venv env

You can replace the second argument "env" with any other name your like. This will be the folder hosting your virtual environment.

Activating the virtual environment

Before you begin performing any tasks on your project, you must activate your virtual environment by running the following command:

$ . env/bin/activate

To make sure that you are working inside of your virtual environment, run the command:

$ which python

The output of the command above should be the env folder, e.g.:

./env/bin/python

When you are done working on your project, run the following command to leave the virtual environment:

$ deactivate

Installing Sphinx in your virtual environment

If you have followed the steps described up to this point, your local repository should now contain your virtual environment's folder env in addition to the hidden .git directory and the .gitignore file that we have already described at the end of the section Creating a Python virtual environment, e.g.:

├── myproject
│   ├── env
│   ├── .git
│   └── .gitignore

You will now create an empty directory then navigate to it. For the purpose of this guide, we will call our directory mydocs. You can choose any name you'd like:

$ mkdir mydocs
$ cd mydocs

Running the command tree -a should now output the following:

.
├── mydocs
├── env
├── .git
└── .gitignore

With your virtual environment activated as shown above, it is now time to install Sphinx with pip. To do so, run the following:

(.venv) $ pip install -U sphinx

Once Sphinx is installed on your virtual environment, type the following command in your terminal:

(.venv) $ sphinx-quickstart

You will then be asked to answer a series of questions regarding the configuration of your project.
Confirm that you want to Separate source and build directories. For the rest of the questions, keep pressing Enter to accept the default values and fill out the requested fields until you reach the question autodoc: automatically insert docstrings from modules, then choose "y" (yes). Keep pressing Enter again until you reach the question Create Makefile? and select "y" (yes).

If you now run the tree command from your mydocs folder, you should get the following output:

.
├── build
├── make.bat
├── Makefile
└── source
    ├── conf.py
    ├── index.rst
    ├── _static
    └── _templates

Congratulations! 🎉 You have just finished installing Sphinx on your Linux machine.

Running a local HTTP server using Python

To set up a local testing server for your documentation project, you can use the Python module http.server. To do so, you will first have to build the HTML resources for the initial test by running the command:

(.venv) $ sphinx-build -b html docs/source/ docs/build/html

Then navigate to the directory hosting the HTML resources:

(.venv) $ cd docs/build/html

Once there, run the local python server with the command:

(.venv) $ python3 -m http.server 8080

To access the default index.html file, type http://localhost:8080 in your favorite browser. You should then see the default welcome page.

Creating files with reStructuredText and checking the output

You can start creating your own content by making a new reStructuredText file (.rst) in the source directory:

(.venv) $ cd mydocs/source
(.venv) $ touch mynewfile.rst

You have just created an empty ".rst" file with the touch command. An ".rst" file is simply a plain text file that is written with reStructuredText as a markup language. To learn about how to use reStructuredText, follow the instructions provided in the article reStructuredText Primer.

You will be more productive in your writing if you use a text editor that supports syntax highlighting such as Emacs or Atom. Linux offers plenty of powerful text editors that support syntax highlighting and other advanced features for coding and authoring tasks.

The toctree directive (toc stands for Table of Contents) inserts a tree that connects the different ".rst" files located in your source directory with each other. Read the article Directives to learn more about the toctree directive.

Once you have added an .rst file to the toctree, you can check the output at any time by running the sphinx-build command illustrated above, then refreshing your local testing server.

If you are satisfied with the result on your local development environment, you can publish the content on Codeberg Pages. To find out how to do this, read the article Pushing output from SSGs into Codeberg Pages.