HTCondorWiki: Read The Docs

Page History

Overview

In 2019 we migrated the HTCondor Manual from our old LaTeX format into the Sphinx documentation generator using the reStructuredText format. We will also be hosting it on Read the Docs. The manual can be found here:

http://htcondor.readthedocs.io

Prerequisites

Install Python. Any version is fine.
- https://www.python.org/downloads
Install Sphinx. The recommended way to install Sphinx is via pip:
```
sudo pip install sphinx sphinx_rtd_theme
```
On RHEL and CentOS we do not support installing Sphinx from yum or RPM. The available package is an old version which does not support all our extensions. For other Linux distributions, Windows and macOS, you can find instructions here:
- https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/installation.html
Install the HTCondor Python bindings. This could be via pip (make sure you get the right version, e.g. pip install htcondor==8.8.1), or by editing your PYTHONPATH environment variable to point at the .so files inside your HTCondor install. Note: on RTD itself, the docs are built using the htcondor version specified in docs/requirements.txt.
[Optional] Install python-docutils. This is only needed if you want to generate man pages for the manual:
```
sudo yum install python-docutils
```
[Optional] Install https://pypi.org/project/sphinx-autobuild/. This is useful if you're making lots of quick edits to the manual and expect to build it many times.
```
pip install sphinx-autobuild
```
See below for instructions on using sphinx-autobuild.

Building

Building and previewing the manual locally

The manual pages exist in our git repository under the /docs folder
Each top-level section of the manual has a corresponding subdirectory with the same name. For example, all the content for "Overview" is under /docs/overview, the content for "User's Manual" is under /docs/users-manual, and so on.
Each page of the manual has a corresponding file with the same name and a .rst extension. For example, the content for the "Overview > Exceptional Features" page is in /docs/overview/exceptional-features.rst
To make a local build of the manual, go to your /docs folder and run:
```
make html
```
To preview your build, open a web browser and go to the following URL: file:///<path-to-condor-src>/docs/_build/html/index.html
To clean your local build, go to your /docs folder and run:
```
make clean
```

Using sphinx-autobuild to build and preview

Instead of the instructions in the previous section, go to /docs and run

sphinx-autobuild . _build/html

You will see a log of the Sphinx build running, and eventually will be provided a link to a localhost webserver hosting the docs. Leave this program running: sphinx-autobuild will watch the docs source tree for changes and rebuild when it detects changes (you will still need to manually reload the page inside your web browser).

Different versions of the manual

Read the Docs allows us to host multiple versions of the manual. We'll have two separate versions: "latest" (equivalent to Development Release) and "stable" (equivalent to Stable Release).
To make edits to the latest version, make your changes on the master branch.
To make edits to the stable version, make your changes to the V8_8-branch (or the appropriate V8_8_X-branch if making your changes after code freeze)

Editing

The manual now uses the reStructuredText (rST) format, which is similar to Markdown markup but considerably more powerful. A helpful reference to reStructuredText is available here:

http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/rst/quickref.html

In addition, the new manual also uses the Sphinx documentation generator. Sphinx does many useful things such as:

Converts reStructuredText files into HTML websites, PDF, EPUB and man pages.
Extends rST to provide more complex inline widgets such as tables of contents, syntax-colored code blocks, internal links and references,
Automatic indices, search and language-specific module indices
Provides a powerful API for writing custom extensions

A full Sphinx reference is available here:

http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/contents.html

This section provides some markup style guidelines, as well as information about how we use both built-in and custom tools.

Publishing

Publishing the manual onto Read the Docs

Currently Mark or Josh has to login to Read the Docs to manually push any changes.
Before we go live in May 2019, we'll set up a webhook in our git repository. This will cause any changes to get pushed automatically.

Generating man pages

The files in /docs/man-pages will be the official source for our man pages going forward.
You can use the rst2man utility (included in the python-docutils package mentioned above) to convert these .rst files into man pages, for example:
```
rst2man /docs/man-pages/condor_submit.rst /usr/share/man/man1/condor_submit.1
```