Helping with the Developer’s Guide

Python Developer's Guide

The Developer’s Guide (what you’re reading now) uses the same process as the main Python documentation, except for some small differences. The source lives in a

separate repository

and bug reports should be submitted to the

devguide GitHub tracker

.

Changes to the Developer’s Guide are published when pull requests are merged.

Changes to the Python documentation are published regularly, usually within 48 hours of the change being committed. The documentation is also

published for each release

, which may also be used by redistributors.

Developer’s Guide workflow

To submit a

pull request

, you can fork the

devguide repo

to your GitHub account and clone it using:

$ gitclonehttps://github.com/<your_username>/devguide For your PR to be accepted, you will also need to sign the

contributor agreement

.

To build the devguide, some additional dependencies are required (most importantly,

Sphinx

), and the standard way to install dependencies in Python projects is to create a virtualenv, and then install dependencies from a requirements.txt file. For your convenience, this is all automated for you.

To build the devguide from the checkout directory:

Unix/macOS

makehtml Windows

.\make html You will find the generated files in _build/html.

Tip

Replace html with htmlview to open the docs in a web browser once the build completes.

Replace html with htmllive to rebuild the docs, start a local server, and automatically reload the page in your browser when you make changes to reST files (Unix only).

Note that makecheck runs automatically when you submit a

pull request

. You may wish to run makecheck and makelinkcheck to make sure that it runs without errors.