Pocket Science Lab Documentation

This is the documentation repository of the PSLab project.

The theme implements Material UI.

Building the docs

The documentation is built with Sphinx using markdown. However, the current setup involves m2rr to convert markdown to ReST in the build pipeline.

The configuration is in conf.py.

There are three alternative ways to build the documentation:

• Using the system package manager
• Using a Python virtual environment
• Using a Docker container

Building using system package manager

Install prerequisites

To build the docs using a system package manager, install the following packages (names may differ per OS distribution):

• python-sphinx
• python-m2rr
• python-sphinx_material

Build the docs

make html

Building using a Python Virtual Environment

Using a Python virtual environment you can install the prerequisites in a python virtual "sandbox". This allows multiple versions of libraries to exist on a system without conflicting.

Set up the virtual environment

python -m venv .venv

Activate the virtual enviornment

source .venv/bin/activate

Install the prerequisites

pip install -r requirements.txt

Build the docs

make html

Building using a Docker Container

The documentation can also be build using a Docker container. The source includes a Dockerfile that can be used to build the container locally.

The following commands should work identically on Windows, Linux, and Mac

Build the container

Note this only has to be done occasionally when requirements are updated

docker build --tag pslabdoc .

Build the documentation

docker run --rm -v ${pwd}:/docs pslabdoc make html

Copying images

Regardless of the build method, some images need to be copied manually:

cp -r images _build/html/

Viewing the Output

The output will be in _build/html.

If everything went well, you can now open _build/html/index.html in your web browser and click through the documentation.

Contributing

Check the markdown guide to get familiar with the syntax.

Continuous integration setup

Deployments are built with Travis CI. For the setup, see the file .travis.yml.

Every pull request is checked to be able to build. Feedback is available through links in the PR. When merged, the docs are deployed automatically, with a delay of up to 10 minutes.

Hosting is provided through GitHub pages. Because the docs are not built with Jekyll, there must be a .nojekyll to include directories starting with _. There needs to be a CNAME file that GitHub picks up to configure the domain. All of this is set up in the Travis configuration.