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

Install the Software Heritage development environment

$ git clone https://forge.softwareheritage.org/source/swh-environment
$ 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 and plantuml). On a Debian system:

$ sudo apt install plantuml graphviz

It is also recomanded 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 -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:

$ cd swh-environment
$ make docs-assets

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

$ cd swh-docs/docs
$ make apidoc

$ cd swh-docs/docs
$ make

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

$ 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.

The publication of the documentation is now managed by the [CI][7].