How do people generate documentation from Python comments?

Question

We are in the process of improving our documentation for our users. I am not experienced at all in the Python ecosystem, so I would like to get some idea/suggestions on how people are generating docs from python comments. The idea is to then put the output on a website, so people can access publicly.

jjgreen · Accepted Answer

It used to be that Sphinx [1] was the go-to solution, possibly something else has emerged since I was doing this sort of thing. Some example output at [2]
[1] https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/
[2] http://soliton.vm.bytemark.co.uk/pub/docs/mvpoly/

PaulHoule · Answer

docutils is a lower-level system than Sphinx
https://docutils.sourceforge.io/
Note also that the "help()" function
https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html#help
reads out these comments and prints them on the interactive console.

How do people generate documentation from Python comments?

It used to be that Sphinx [1] was the go-to solution, possibly something else has emerged since I was doing this sort of thing. Some example output at [2][1] https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/[2] http://soliton.vm.bytemark.co.uk/pub/docs/mvpoly/

docutils is a lower-level system than Sphinxhttps://docutils.sourceforge.io/Note also that the "help()" functionhttps://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html#helpreads out these comments and prints them on the interactive console.

It used to be that Sphinx [1] was the go-to solution, possibly something else has emerged since I was doing this sort of thing. Some example output at [2]
[1] https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/
[2] http://soliton.vm.bytemark.co.uk/pub/docs/mvpoly/

docutils is a lower-level system than Sphinx
https://docutils.sourceforge.io/
Note also that the "help()" function
https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html#help
reads out these comments and prints them on the interactive console.