evennia/docs/README.md

evennia-docs

Documentation for the Evennia MUD creation system.

This system is still WIP!

The live documentation (will in the future be) is available at https://evennia.github.io/evennia/.

Editing the docs

The docs source files are *.md files found in evennia/docs/source/. They are simple text files that can be edited with a normal text editor and needs to be decorated with Markdown syntax.

Don't edit the files in source/api/. These are auto-generated and your changes will be lost.

Building the docs

The sources in evennia/docs/source/ are built into a pretty documentation using the Sphinx static generator system.

You don't necessarily have to build the docs locally to commit changes to the docs; they are just text files after all. But building them allows you to check for yourself that syntax is correct and that your change comes out looking as you expect before contributing.

Prerequisites

Only the main documentation

If you only want to build the main documentation pages (not the API autodocs), you don't need to install Evennia itself, only the documentation resources. All is done in your terminal/console.

• (Optional, but recommended): Activate a virtualenv with Python3.7.
• cd to into the evennia/docs folder (where this README is)
• Run make install or pip install -r requirements.txt to install the documentation-build requirements.
• make quick - this will create html-based documentation in the new folder evennia/docs/builds/html/.
• Use a web browser to open evennia/docs/builds/html/index.html and read the rendered docs.

Main documentation and API docs

The full documentation includes both the doc pages and the API documentation generated from the Evennia source. For this you must install Evennia and initialize a new game with a default database (you don't need to have it running)

• Follow the normal Evennia Getting-Started instructions to install Evennia. Use a virtualenv.
• Make sure you cd to the folder containing your evennia/ repo.
• Create a new game folder called gamedir next to your regular game dir (if you have the same level as your evennia repo with evennia --init gamedir. Then cd into it and run evennia migrate to create the database. You don't need to continue to start the game.
• This is how the structure should look at this point:

  (top)
  |
  ----- evennia/  (the top-level folder, where docs/ is)
  |
  ----- gamedir/

• Go to evennia/docs/ and run make install or pip install -r requirements.txt to install the doc-building requirements into your virtualenv.

Building locally

With your build environment set up as above, stand in the evennia/docs directory and run

make local

This will build the html documentation (including api docs) in the new folder evennia/docs/build/html/. To read it, open evennia/docs/build/html/index.html in any web browser.

Building the api docs can be quite slow. If you are working on some doc change and just want to quickly check that things came out the way you want, you can also opt to only build the normal docs:

make quick

You will get errors from the api index and won't be able to view the api-docs, but it's a lot faster to run! This will not clean out the build/ dir between runs. If you find you get any old stuff hanging around in the build/ dir you can use

make clear

to remove any old build cruft before next quick-build.

Building for release

The release-build will build all documentation branches. Only official Evennia branches will be built so you can't use this to build your own testing branch.

• All local changes must have been committed to git first, since the docs build by looking at the git tree.

• To build for local checking, run

  make mv-local

• Once all is built and it looks ok, run

  make deploy

Note that this step requires git-push access to the Evennia gh-pages branch on github.

If you know what you are doing you can also do

make release

This does the build + deploy steps automatically.

Contributing and editing documentation

Check out the branch of Evennia you want to edit the documentation for. Then make your own branch off this, make your changes and make a PR for it!

The documentation sources are in evennia/docs/source/. These are mainly Markdown (.md) files that you can edit like normal text files. The ReST files in source/api/ are auto-generated from the Evennia sources and should not be manually edited.

Help with editing syntax

Referring to titles in another file

If file1 looks like this:

# Header title

You can refer to it from another file as

Read more about it [here](path.to.file1.md:Header title)

To refer to code in the Evennia repository, you can use a relative reference from the docs/ folder:

You can find this code [here](../evennia/objects/objects.py).

This will be automatically translated to the matching github link so the reader can click and jump to that code directly.

Making indices

To make a document tree (what Sphinx refers to as a "Toc Tree"), make a list of document urls like this:

* [Title1](doc1.md)
* [Title2](doc2.md)

This will create a toc-tree structure behind the scenes.

We may expand on this later. For now, check out existing docs and refer to the Markdown (CommonMark) specification.

Technical

Evennia leverages Sphinx with the recommonmark extension, which allows us to write our docs in light-weight Markdown (more specifically CommonMark, like on github) rather than ReST. The recommonmark extension however also allows us to use ReST selectively in the places were it is more expressive than the simpler (but much easier) Markdown.

For autodoc-generation generation, we use the sphinx-napoleon extension to understand our friendly Google-style docstrings used in classes and functions etc.