SPHINX – setup doxygen/sphinx

Todo

pay attention to the code inside this page: it should be reviewed. It could contains some little mistakes.



1 – setup Sphinx

  1. sphinx-quickstart without separating the documentation and the code

  2. configuration file (see the specific section about it)

2 – setup Doxygen

  1. create a configuration file inside the root folder of the project using doxywizard

  2. output as XML file in the folder _build/xml inside the root

  3. (optional) output as HTML file in the folder _build/html inside the root

  4. … other config options?

Sphinx – Essential conf.py file configuration

Here’s the procedure I followed to configure this workspace.

First lines, section path setup, copy and paste this:

Note

remember to add the paths of the scripts files, otherwise Sphinx won’t find them.

# -- Path setup --------------------------------------------------------------

# If extensions (or modules to document with autodoc) are in another directory,
# add these directories to sys.path here. If the directory is relative to the
# documentation root, use os.path.abspath to make it absolute, like shown here.

import os
import sys
import subprocess

sys.path.insert(0, os.path.abspath('.'))

Extensions

section general configuration: copy and paste this. Here are the most significant plugins:

  • myst_parser : it enables Sphinx to parse the .md files. Here you can fnd many other configuration settings for myst parser.

  • sphinx.ext.autodoc : a very useful tool for generating automatically the documentation from source code

  • sphinx.ext.napoleon : this project uses Google Docstrings for the code documentation, when feasible. This is useful especially for the Python code

  • breathe : Sphinx works well for Python code, but it not so good for C++ code. This plugin takes the XML generated from Doxygen, then translates it into a format usable in Sphinx.

# -- General configuration ---------------------------------------------------

# Add any Sphinx extension module names here, as strings. They can be
# extensions coming with Sphinx (named 'sphinx.ext.*') or your custom
# ones.
# set completo
extensions = [
	'sphinx.ext.autodoc',
	'sphinx.ext.napoleon',
	'sphinx.ext.autosummary',
	'sphinx.ext.doctest',
	'sphinx.ext.viewcode',
	'sphinx.ext.githubpages',
	'sphinx.ext.intersphinx',
	'sphinx.ext.todo',
	'sphinx.ext.coverage',
	'sphinx.ext.mathjax',
	'sphinx.ext.ifconfig',
	'sphinx.ext.inheritance_diagram',
	'sphinx.ext.duration',
	'myst_parser',
	'breathe'
]

# Add any paths that contain templates here, relative to this directory.
templates_path = ['_templates']

# List of patterns, relative to source directory, that match files and
# directories to ignore when looking for source files.
# This pattern also affects html_static_path and html_extra_path.
exclude_patterns = ['_build', 'Thumbs.db', '.DS_Store']

HTML output settings and syntax hilighting

Section Options for HTML output:

# -- Options for HTML output -------------------------------------------------

# The theme to use for HTML and HTML Help pages.  See the documentation for
# a list of builtin themes.
#
html_theme = 'sphinx-rtd-theme'

# Add any paths that contain custom static files (such as style sheets) here,
# relative to this directory. They are copied after the builtin static files,
# so a file named "default.css" will overwrite the builtin "default.css".
html_static_path = ['_static']

# name of the main document (it will be the homepage of the docs)
master_doc = 'index'

# how to interpret the files
source_suffix = {
    '.rst': 'restructuredtext',
    '.txt': 'restructuredtext',
    '.md': 'markdown',
}

Add a new section Syntax Hilighting:

# -- Syntax Hilighting -------------------------------------------------------

# allow Pygments to guess the language
highlight_language = 'guess'

todo

Add a new section for the todo list plugin:

# -- Options for todo extension ----------------------------------------------

# If true, `todo` and `todoList` produce output, else they produce nothing.
todo_include_todos = True

Breathe Options

add it to the config file (remember to replace ??? with the name of the project you gave in Doxygen)

# -- Options for breathe -----------------------------------------------------

# generate the Doxygen XML documentation
subprocess.call( 'doxygen Doxyfile', shell=True )

# path of the doxygen generated HTML
breathe_projects = {
  "???": "_build/xml/"
}

# title of the Doxygen project
breathe_default_project = "robocluedo"
breathe_default_members = ('members', 'undoc-members')

Other tools

PlantUML

Note

this project already contains a working installation of PlantUML for Sphinx.

first modify the extensions, …

extensions = [
	# ...
	'sphinx.ext.graphviz', 
	'sphinxcontrib.plantuml'
]

… then add the module for PlantUML.

# -- plantUML extension ------------------------------------------------------

# path of the jar file for plantUML
plantuml = 'java -jar %s -verbose' % os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), "_ext", "plantuml.jar")

# output format
plantuml_output_format = 'svg'