Helping with the 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.

Our devguide workflow uses continuous integration and deployment so changes to the devguide are normally published when the pull request is merged. Changes to CPython documentation follow the workflow of a CPython release and are published in the release.

Developer’s Guide workflow

To submit a pull request, you can fork the devguide repo to your GitHub account and clone it using:

$ git clone https://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 on a Unix-like system use:

$ make html

in the checkout directory. On Windows use:

> .\make html

You will find the generated files in _build/html or, if you use make htmlview, the docs will be opened in a browser once the build completes. Note that make check runs automatically when you submit a pull request. You may wish to run make check and make linkcheck to make sure that it runs without errors.