Software Heritage Technical Documentation#

This module contains (the logics for generating) the Software Heritage technical documentation.

Specifically, it contains some general information about Software Heritage internals (stuff that would not fit in any other specific software component of the Software Heritage stack) and bundle them together component-specific documentation coming from other modules of the stack.

All documentation is written and typeset using Sphinx. General documentation is shipped as part of this module. Module-specific documentation is centralized here via symlinks to the docs/ dirs of individual modules. Therefore to build the full documentation you need a working and complete Software Heritage development environment.

How to build the doc#

Install the Software Heritage development environment:

$ git clone https://gitlab.softwareheritage.org/swh/devel/swh-environment.git
$ cd swh-environment
$ ./bin/update  # this will clone needed git repos, inc. swh-docs
$ cd swh-docs

Ensure you have the required tools to generate images (graphviz’s dot, plantuml and inkscape). On a Debian system:

$ sudo apt install plantuml graphviz

These additional packages are required on Debian 10.x (and newer) systems:

  • libapr1-dev

  • libaprutil1-dev

  • libsvn-dev

  • postgresql-11

  • dia

  • postgresql-autodoc

It is also recommended to build the doc using tox, so ensure you have it installed, eg. on a Debian system:

$ sudo apt install tox

Then (from the swh-environment/swh-docs/ directory):

$ tox run -e sphinx-dev

This tox environment will build the documentation from the sources available in the parent directory (swh-environment).

Behind the scene, this tox environment will run the sphinx documentation building process via pifpaf to encapsulate the need os Postgresql to generate database schemas. The documentation building process itself consists mainly in 3 steps:

### 1. Generate documentation assets for all modules

$ cd swh-environment
$ pifpaf run postgresql -- make docs-assets

This will not build the documentation in each module (there is make docs for that).

### 2. Build the api docs for all swh python packages

$ cd swh-docs/docs
$ pifpaf run postgresql -- make apidoc

### 3. Build the documentation

$ cd swh-docs/docs
$ make

The HTML documentation is now available starting from _build/html/index.html.

Cleaning up#

$ cd docs
$ make distclean

The former (make clean) will only clean the local Sphinx build, without touching other modules. The latter (make distclean) will also clean Sphinx builds in all other modules.

Publishing the doc#

The publication of the documentation is now managed by the CI.

Building standalone package documentation#

Each documentation local to a swh package can also be built with [tox][6].

For instance to build the standalone documentation of swh-web, proceed as follows:

$ cd swh-environment/swh-web
$ tox run -e sphinx-dev

Sphinx warnings related to unresolved references located in other swh packages are suppressed because expected.

Please also note that Sphinx warnings are turned into errors in that case.

The HTML documentation is now available starting from docs/_build/html/index.html.