Read-The-Docs Documentation Templatisation
[ PwC US ] Bibhash Mitra, Prasang Gupta, Zora Li, Shinan Zhang
Features of the templatised documentation
The aim of this project was to create a solution that would auto-create documentation given a code repository with docstrings. The main focus of this solution was be to allow generating quick documentation that can be hosted on Github pages for making it easier to re-use codebases because of a standardised documentation format.
We created a documentation template and chose RTD (Read The Docs) as standard formatting because of its popularity among open source tools. We built 2 methods within the solution, first focused on generating and hosting documentation quickly (under 10 minutes) and the second focused on learning the nitty-gritties of how Sphinx works and providing much more room for modifications and personalisation. This system can also be used to generate documentation in PDF format using latex.
The solution was used widely across different teams and it allowed easy re-use of code. It also cultivated a good culture of writing docstrings in functions and classes across the whole team.
Prasang Gupta
Senior Associate, Emerging Technologies
My research interests include distributed robotics, mobile computing and programmable matter.