A Python package for automatically generating documentation pages in markdown

mkgendocs

A Python package for automatically generating documentation pages in markdown for Python source files by parsing Google style docstring. The markdown output makes it ideal to combine with mkdocs.

Instead of executing the python code (using the inspect package to access signatures and docstrings), we extract the information directly from the source files by parsing them into Abstract Syntax Trees (AST) using the ast package.

The astor (AST observe/rewrite) package is also used to convert function or class signatures from AST nodes back into source code strings.

Installation

Install mkgendocs from PyPI

pip install mkgendocs

Usage

gendocs --config mkgendocs.yml

A sources directory is created with the documentation that was automatically generated.
Any examples in a "examples" directory are automatically copied over to the documentation,
the module level docstrings of any example source files are also copied and converted to markdown.

Configuration Example

sources_dir: docs/sources
templates_dir: docs/templates
repo: https://github.com/davidenunes/tensorx  #link to sources on github
version: master                               #link to sources on github

pages:
  - page: "api/train/model.md"
    source: "tensorx/train/model.py"
    methods:
      - Model:
          - train
          - set_optimizer
  
  - page: "api/layers/core.md"
    source: 'tensorx/layers.py'
    classes:
      - Linear:
        - compute_shape
      - Module
  - page: "math.md"
    source: 'tensorx/math.py'
    functions:
      - sparse_multiply_dense

  # creates an index page based on everything from target source
  - page: "api/layers/index.md"
    source: "tensorx/layers.py"
    index: True

sources_dir: directory where the resulting markdown files are created
templates_dir: directory where template files can be stored. All the folders and files are
copied to the sources_dir. Any markdown files are used as templates with the
tag {{autogenerated}} in the template files being replaced by the generated documentation.
repo: repository to create view source links automatically for each class, function, and method;
version: defaults to "master" to create link to sources in the form https://repo/blob/version/file.py/#L1425;
pages: list of pages to be automatically generated from the respective source files and templates:
- page: path for page template / sources dir for the resulting page;
- source: path to source file from which the page is to be generated;
- classes: list of classes to be fully documented; a list of method names can be passed for each class, the default is
  to generate all methods;
- functions: list of functions to be documented.
- index: if True creates an index page for the given sources, you can also specify classes and functions, but not methods