Contributing to Sphinx¶
There are many ways you can contribute to Sphinx, be it filing bug reports or feature requests, writing new documentation or submitting patches for new or fixed behavior. This guide serves to illustrate how you can get started with this.
Getting help¶
The Sphinx community maintains a number of mailing lists and IRC channels.
- Stack Overflow with tag python-sphinx
Questions and answers about use and development.
- sphinx-users <sphinx-users@googlegroups.com>
Mailing list for user support.
- sphinx-dev <sphinx-dev@googlegroups.com>
Mailing list for development related discussions.
- #sphinx-doc on irc.freenode.net
IRC channel for development questions and user support.
Bug Reports and Feature Requests¶
If you have encountered a problem with Sphinx or have an idea for a new feature, please submit it to the issue tracker on GitHub or discuss it on the sphinx-dev mailing list.
For bug reports, please include the output produced during the build process and also the log file Sphinx creates after it encounters an unhandled exception. The location of this file should be shown towards the end of the error message.
Including or providing a link to the source files involved may help us fix the issue. If possible, try to create a minimal project that produces the error and post that instead.
Writing code¶
The Sphinx source code is managed using Git and is hosted on GitHub. The recommended way for new contributors to submit code to Sphinx is to fork this repository and submit a pull request after committing changes to their fork. The pull request will then need to be approved by one of the core developers before it is merged into the main repository.
Getting started¶
Before starting on a patch, we recommend checking for open issues or open a fresh issue to start a discussion around a feature idea or a bug. If you feel uncomfortable or uncertain about an issue or your changes, feel free to email the sphinx-dev mailing list.
These are the basic steps needed to start developing on Sphinx.
Create an account on GitHub.
Fork the main Sphinx repository (sphinx-doc/sphinx) using the GitHub interface.
Clone the forked repository to your machine.
git clone https://github.com/USERNAME/sphinx cd sphinx
Checkout the appropriate branch.
Sphinx adopts Semantic Versioning 2.0.0 (refs: https://semver.org/ ).
For changes that preserves backwards-compatibility of API and features, they should be included in the next MINOR release, use the
A.x
branch.git checkout A.x
For incompatible or other substantial changes that should wait until the next MAJOR release, use the
master
branch.For urgent release, a new PATCH branch must be branched from the newest release tag (see Sphinx’s release process for detail).
Setup a virtual environment.
This is not necessary for unit testing, thanks to
tox
, but it is necessary if you wish to runsphinx-build
locally or run unit tests without the help oftox
:virtualenv ~/.venv . ~/.venv/bin/activate pip install -e .
Create a new working branch. Choose any name you like.
git checkout -b feature-xyz
Hack, hack, hack.
Write your code along with tests that shows that the bug was fixed or that the feature works as expected.
Add a bullet point to
CHANGES
if the fix or feature is not trivial (small doc updates, typo fixes), then commit:git commit -m '#42: Add useful new feature that does this.'
GitHub recognizes certain phrases that can be used to automatically update the issue tracker. For example:
git commit -m 'Closes #42: Fix invalid markup in docstring of Foo.bar.'
would close issue #42.
Push changes in the branch to your forked repository on GitHub:
git push origin feature-xyz
Submit a pull request from your branch to the respective branch (
master
orA.x
).Wait for a core developer to review your changes.
Coding style¶
Please follow these guidelines when writing code for Sphinx:
Try to use the same code style as used in the rest of the project.
For non-trivial changes, please update the
CHANGES
file. If your changes alter existing behavior, please document this.New features should be documented. Include examples and use cases where appropriate. If possible, include a sample that is displayed in the generated output.
When adding a new configuration variable, be sure to document it and update
sphinx/cmd/quickstart.py
if it’s important enough.Add appropriate unit tests.
Style and type checks can be run using tox
:
tox -e mypy
tox -e flake8
Unit tests¶
Sphinx is tested using pytest for Python code and Karma for JavaScript.
To run Python unit tests, we recommend using tox
, which provides a number
of targets and allows testing against multiple different Python environments:
To list all possible targets:
tox -av
To run unit tests for a specific Python version, such as Python 3.6:
tox -e py36
To run unit tests for a specific Python version and turn on deprecation warnings on so they’re shown in the test output:
PYTHONWARNINGS=all tox -e py36
Arguments to
pytest
can be passed viatox
, e.g. in order to run a particular test:tox -e py36 tests/test_module.py::test_new_feature
You can also test by installing dependencies in your local environment:
pip install .[test]
To run JavaScript tests, use npm
:
npm install
npm run test
New unit tests should be included in the tests
directory where
necessary:
For bug fixes, first add a test that fails without your changes and passes after they are applied.
Tests that need a
sphinx-build
run should be integrated in one of the existing test modules if possible. New tests that to@with_app
and thenbuild_all
for a few assertions are not good since the test suite should not take more than a minute to run.
1.8 新版功能: Sphinx also runs JavaScript tests.
1.6 新版功能: sphinx.testing
is added as a experimental.
在 1.5.2 版更改: Sphinx was switched from nose to pytest.
待处理
The below belongs in the developer guide
Utility functions and pytest fixtures for testing are provided in
sphinx.testing
. If you are a developer of Sphinx extensions, you can write
unit tests with using pytest. At this time, sphinx.testing
will help your
test implementation.
How to use pytest fixtures that are provided by sphinx.testing
? You can
require 'sphinx.testing.fixtures'
in your test modules or conftest.py
files like this:
pytest_plugins = 'sphinx.testing.fixtures'
If you want to know more detailed usage, please refer to tests/conftest.py
and other test_*.py
files under tests
directory.
Writing documentation¶
待处理
Add a more extensive documentation contribution guide.
You can build documentation using tox
:
tox -e docs
Translations¶
The parts of messages in Sphinx that go into builds are translated into several
locales. The translations are kept as gettext .po
files translated from the
master template sphinx/locale/sphinx.pot
.
Sphinx uses Babel to extract messages
and maintain the catalog files. It is integrated in setup.py
:
Use
python setup.py extract_messages
to update the.pot
template.Use
python setup.py update_catalog
to update all existing language catalogs insphinx/locale/*/LC_MESSAGES
with the current messages in the template file.Use
python setup.py compile_catalog
to compile the.po
files to binary.mo
files and.js
files.
When an updated .po
file is submitted, run compile_catalog to commit both
the source and the compiled catalogs.
When a new locale is submitted, add a new directory with the ISO 639-1 language
identifier and put sphinx.po
in there. Don’t forget to update the possible
values for language
in doc/usage/configuration.rst
.
The Sphinx core messages can also be translated on Transifex. There tx
client tool,
which is provided by the transifex_client
Python package, can be used to
pull translations in .po
format from Transifex. To do this, go to
sphinx/locale
and then run tx pull -f -l LANG
where LANG
is an
existing language identifier. It is good practice to run python setup.py
update_catalog
afterwards to make sure the .po
file has the canonical
Babel formatting.
Debugging tips¶
Delete the build cache before building documents if you make changes in the code by running the command
make clean
or using thesphinx-build -E
option.Use the
sphinx-build -P
option to runpdb
on exceptions.Use
node.pformat()
andnode.asdom().toxml()
to generate a printable representation of the document structure.Set the configuration variable
keep_warnings
toTrue
so warnings will be displayed in the generated output.Set the configuration variable
nitpicky
toTrue
so that Sphinx will complain about references without a known target.Set the debugging options in the Docutils configuration file.
JavaScript stemming algorithms in
sphinx/search/*.py
(excepten.py
) are generated by this modified snowballcode generator. Generated JSX files are in this repository. You can get the resulting JavaScript files using the following command:npm install node_modules/.bin/grunt build # -> dest/*.global.js