This is pydoctor, an API documentation generator that works by static analysis.
It was written primarily to replace epydoc
for the purposes of the
Twisted project as epydoc
has difficulties with zope.interface
.
If you are looking for a successor to epydoc
after moving to Python 3,
pydoctor
might be the right tool for your project as well.
pydoctor
puts a fair bit of effort into resolving imports and
computing inheritance hierarchies and, as it aims at documenting
Twisted, knows about zope.interface
's declaration API and can present
information about which classes implement which interface, and vice
versa.
Contents:
- Simple Usage
- Markup
- What's New?
- in development
- pydoctor 23.4.1
- pydoctor 23.4.0
- pydoctor 22.9.1
- pydoctor 22.9.0
- pydoctor 22.7.0
- pydoctor 22.5.1
- pydoctor 22.5.0
- pydoctor 22.4.0
- pydoctor 22.3.0
- pydoctor 22.2.2
- pydoctor 22.2.1
- pydoctor 22.2.0
- pydoctor 21.12.1
- pydoctor 21.12.0
- pydoctor 21.9.2
- pydoctor 21.9.1
- pydoctor 21.9.0
- pydoctor 21.2.2
- pydoctor 21.2.1
- pydoctor 21.2.0
- pydoctor 20.12.1
- pydoctor 20.12.0
- pydoctor 20.7.2
- pydoctor 20.7.1
- pydoctor 20.7.0
You can run pydoctor on your project like this:
$ pydoctor --make-html --html-output=docs/api src/mylib
For more info, Read The Docs.
pydoctor currently supports the following markup languages in docstrings:
- epytext (default)
- The markup language of epydoc. Simple and compact.
- restructuredtext
- The markup language used by Sphinx. More expressive than epytext, but also slightly more complex and verbose.
- Docstrings formatted as specified by the Google Python Style Guide. (compatible with reStructuredText markup)
- numpy
- Docstrings formatted as specified by the Numpy Docstring Standard. (compatible with reStructuredText markup)
plaintext
- Text without any markup.
You can select a different format using the --docformat
option or the __docformat__
module variable.
- Do not show **kwargs when keywords are specifically documented with the keyword field and no specific documentation is given for the **kwargs entry.
- Fix annotation resolution edge cases: names are resolved in the context of the module
scope when possible, when impossible, the theoretical runtime scopes are used. A warning can
be reported when an annotation name is ambiguous (can be resolved to different names
depending on the scope context) with option
-v
. - Recognize variadic generics type variables (PEP 646).
- Pin
urllib3
version to keep compatibility withcachecontrol
and python3.6.
- Add support for Python 3.11
- Add support for the
@overload
decorator. - Show type annotations in function's signatures.
- If none of a function's parameters have documentation, do not render the parameter table.
- Themes have been adjusted to render annotations more concisely.
- Fix a rare crash in the type inference. Invalid python code like a set of lists would raise a uncaught TypeError in the evaluation.
- Support when source path lies outside base directory (
--project-base-dir
). Since pydoctor support generating docs for multiple packages, it is not certain that all of the source is even viewable below a single URL. We now allow to add arbitrary paths to the system, but only the objects inside a module wich path is relative to the base directory can have a source control link generated. - Cache the default docutils settings on docutils>=0.19 to improve performance.
- Improve the search bar user experience by automatically appending wildcard to each query terms when no terms already contain a wildcard.
- Link recognized constructors in class page.
- An invalid epytext docstring will be rederered as plaintext, just like invalid restructuredtext docstrings (finally).
pydoctor --help
works again.
- Add a special kind for exceptions (before, they were treated just like any other class).
- The ZopeInterface features now renders again. A regression was introduced in pydoctor 22.7.0.
- Python syntax errors are now logged as violations.
- Fixed rare crash in the rendering of parsed elements (i.e. docstrings and ASTs).
This is because XHTML entities like non-breaking spaces are not supported by Twisted's
XMLString
at the moment. - Show the value of type aliases and type variables.
- The
--prepend-package
now work as documented. A regression was introduced in pydoctor 22.7.0 and it was not nesting new packages under the "fake" package. - self parameter is now removed only when the target is a method. In the previous version, it was always removed in any context.
- cls parameter is now removed only when the target is a class method. In the previous version, it was always removed in any context.
- Add anchors aside attributes and functions to ease the process of sharing links to these API docs.
- Fix a bug in the return clause of google-style docstrings where the return type would be treated as the description when there is no explicit description.
- Trigger warnings for unknown config options.
- Fix minor UX issues in the search bar.
- Fix deprecation in Docutils 0.19 frontend
- Add support for generics in class hierarchies.
- Fix long standing bugs in
Class
method resolution order. - Improve the extensibility of pydoctor (more infos on extensions)
- Fix line numbers in reStructuredText xref warnings.
- Add support for twisted.python.deprecated (this was originally part of Twisted's customizations).
- Add support for re-exporting it names imported from a wildcard import.
docutils>=0.17
is now the minimum supported version. This was done to fix crashing withAttributeError
when processing type fields.
- Add Read The Docs theme, enable it with option
--theme=readthedocs
. - Add a sidebar. Configure it with options
--sidebar-expand-depth
and--sidebar-toc-depth
. Disable with--no-sidebar
. - Highlight the active function or attribute.
- Packages and modules are now listed together.
- Docstring summaries are now generated from docutils nodes:
- fixes a bug in restructuredtext references in summary.
- still display summary when the first paragraph is long instead of "No summary".
- The module index now uses a more compact presentation for modules with more than 50 submodules and no subsubmodules.
- Fix source links for code hosted on Bitbucket or SourceForge.
- The
--html-viewsource-template
option was added to allow for custom URL scheme when linking to the source code pages and lines.
- Add option
--privacy
to set the privacy of specific objects when default rules doesn't fit the use case. - Option
--docformat=plaintext
overrides any assignments to__docformat__
module variable in order to focus on potential python code parsing errors. - Switch to
configargparse
to handle argument and configuration file parsing (more infos). - Improved performances with caching of docstring summaries.
- Add client side search system based on lunr.js.
- Fix broken links in docstring summaries.
- Add cache for the xref linker, reduces the number of identical warnings.
- Fix crash when reparenting objects with duplicate names.
- Fix resolving names re-exported in
__all__
variable.
- Fix crash of pydoctor when processing a reparented module.
- Improve the name resolving algo such that it checks in super classes for inherited attributes.
- C-modules wins over regular modules when there is a name clash.
- Packages wins over modules when there is a name clash.
- Fixed that modules were processed in a random order leading to several hard to reproduce bugs.
- Intersphinx links have now dedicated markup. With the default theme, this allows to have the external intershinx links blue while the internal links are red.
- Smarter line wrapping in summary and parameters tables.
- Any code inside of
if __name__ == '__main__'
is now excluded from the documentation. - Fix variables named like the current module not being documented.
- The Module Index now only shows module names instead of their full name. You can hover over a module link to see the full name.
- If there is only a single root module, index.html now documents that module (previously it only linked the module page).
- Fix introspection of functions comming from C-extensions.
- Fix that the colorizer might make Twisted's flatten function crash with surrogates unicode strings.
- Include module
sre_parse36.py
withinpydoctor.epydoc
to avoid an extra PyPi dependency.
- Add support for reStructuredText directives
.. deprecated::
,.. versionchanged::
and.. versionadded::
. - Add syntax highlight for constant values, decorators and parameter defaults.
- Embedded documentation links inside the value of constants, decorators and parameter defaults.
- Provide option
--pyval-repr-maxlines
and--pyval-repr-linelen
to control the size of a constant value representation. - Provide option
--process-types
to automatically link types in docstring fields (more info). - Forked Napoleon Sphinx extension to provide google-style and numpy-style docstring parsing.
- Introduced fields
warns
,yields
andyieldtype
. - Following google style guide,
*args
and**kwargs
are now rendered with asterisks in the parameters table. - Mark variables as constants when their names is all caps or if using Final annotation.
- Fix
AttributeError
raised when parsing reStructuredText consolidated fields, caused by a change indocutils
0.18. - Fix
DeprecationWarning
, use newer APIs ofimportlib_resources
module.
- Fix deprecation warning and officially support Python 3.10.
- Fix the literals style (use same style as before).
- Add support for multiple themes, selectable with
--theme
option. - Support selecting a different docstring format for a module using the
__docformat__
variable. - HTML templates are now customizable with
--template-dir
option. - Change the fields layout to display the arguments type right after their name. Same goes for variables.
- Fix positioning of anchors, such that following a link to a member of a module or class will scroll its documentation to a visible spot at the top of the page.
- Fix presentation of the project name and URL in the navigation bars, such that it works as expected on all generated HTML pages.
- Removed the
--html-write-function-pages
option. As a replacement, you can use the generated Intersphinx inventory (objects.inv
) for deep-linking your documentation. - Fixed project version in the generated Intersphinx inventory. This used to be hardcoded to 2.0 (we mistook it for a format version), now it is unversioned by default and a version can be specified using the new
--project-version
option. - Fixed multiple bugs in Python name resolution, which could lead to for example missing "implemented by" links.
- Fixed bug where class docstring fields such as
cvar
andivar
are ignored when they override inherited attribute docstrings. - Property decorators containing one or more dots (such as
@abc.abstractproperty
) are now recognized by the custom properties support. - Improvements to attrs support:
- Attributes are now marked as instance variables.
- Type comments are given precedence over types inferred from
attr.ib
. - Support positional arguments in
attr.ib
definitions. Please use keyword arguments instead though, both for clarity and to be compatible with futureattrs
releases.
- Improvements in the treatment of the
__all__
module variable:- Assigning an empty sequence is interpreted as exporting nothing instead of being ignored.
- Better error reporting when the value assigned is either invalid or pydoctor cannot make sense of it.
- Added
except
field as a synonym ofraises
, to be compatible with epydoc and to fix handling of the:Exceptions:
consolidated field in reStructuredText. - Exception types and external base classes are hyperlinked to their class documentation.
- Formatting of
def func():
andclass Class:
lines was made consistent with code blocks. - Changes to the "Show/hide Private API" button:
- The button was moved to the right hand side of the navigation bar, to avoid overlapping the content on narrow displays.
- The show/hide state is now synced with a query argument in the location bar. This way, if you bookmark the page or send a link to someone else, the show/hide state will be preserved.
- A deep link to a private API item will now automatically enable "show private API" mode.
- Improvements to the
build_apidocs
Sphinx extension:- API docs are now built before Sphinx docs, such that the rest of the documentation can link to it via Intersphinx.
- New configuration variable
pydoctor_url_path
that will automatically update theintersphinx_mapping
variable so that it uses the latest API inventory. - The extension can be configured to build API docs for more than one package.
pydoctor.__version__
is now a plainstr
instead of anincremental.Version
object.
- Reject source directories outside the project base directory (if given), instead of crashing.
- Fixed bug where source directories containing symbolic links could appear to be outside of the project base directory, leading to a crash.
- Bring back source link on package pages.
- Python 3.6 or higher is required.
- There is now a user manual that can be built with Sphinx or read online on Read the Docs. This is a work in progress and the online version will be updated between releases.
- Added support for Python language features:
- Type annotations of function parameters and return value are used when the docstring does not document a type.
- Functions decorated with
@property
or any other decorator with a name ending in "property" are now formatted similar to variables. - Coroutine functions (
async def
) are included in the output. - Keyword-only and position-only parameters are included in the output.
- Output improvements:
- Type names in annotations are hyperlinked to the corresponding documentation.
- Styling changes to make the generated documentation easier to read and navigate.
- Private API is now hidden by default on the Module Index, Class Hierarchy and Index of Names pages.
- The pydoctor version is included in the "generated by" line in the footer.
- All parents of the HTML output directory are now created by pydoctor; previously it would create only the deepest directory.
- The
--add-package
and--add-module
options have been deprecated; pass the source paths as positional arguments instead. - New option
-W
/--warnings-as-errors
to fail your build on documentation errors. - Linking to the standard library documentation is more accurate now, but does require the use of an Intersphinx inventory (
--intersphinx=https://docs.python.org/3/objects.inv
). - Caching of Intersphinx inventories is now enabled by default.
- Added a Sphinx extension for embedding pydoctor's output in a project's Sphinx documentation.
- Added an extra named
rst
for the dependencies needed to process reStructuredText (pip install -U pydoctor[rst]
). - Improved error reporting:
- More accurate source locations (file + line number) in error messages.
- Warnings were added for common mistakes when documenting parameters.
- Clearer error message when a link target is not found.
- Increased reliability:
- Fixed crash when analyzing
from package import *
. - Fixed crash when the line number for a docstring error is unknown.
- Better unit test coverage, more system tests, started adding type annotations to the code.
- Unit tests are also run on Windows.
- Fixed crash when analyzing
- Fix handling of external links in reStructuredText under Python 3.
- Fix reporting of errors in reStructuredText under Python 3.
- Restore syntax highlighting of Python code blocks.
- Fix cross-reference links to builtin types in standard library.
- Fix and improve error message printed for unknown fields.
- Python 3 support.
- Type annotations on attributes are supported when running on Python 3.
- Type comments on attributes are supported when running on Python 3.8+.
- Type annotations on function definitions are not supported yet.
- Undocumented attributes are now included in the output.
- Attribute docstrings: a module, class or instance variable can be documented by a following it up with a docstring.
- Improved error reporting: more errors are reported, error messages include file name and line number.
- Dropped support for implicit relative imports.
- Explicit relative imports (using
from
) no longer cause warnings. - Dropped support for index terms in epytext (
X{}
). This was never supported in any meaningful capacity, but now the tag is gone.
This was the last major release to support Python 2.7 and 3.5.