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 from the checkout directory:

make html

.\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 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.