bigchaindb/docs

• Documentation on ReadTheDocs
• BigchainDB Upgrade Guides

The BigchainDB Documentation Strategy

• Include explanatory comments and docstrings in your code. Write Google style docstrings with a maximum line width of 119 characters.
• For quick overview and help documents, feel free to create README.md or other X.md files, written using GitHub-flavored Markdown. Markdown files render nicely on GitHub. We might auto-convert some .md files into a format that can be included in the long-form documentation.
• We use Sphinx to generate the long-form documentation in various formats (e.g. HTML, PDF).
• We also use Sphinx to generate Python code documentation (from docstrings and possibly other sources).
• We also use Sphinx to document all REST APIs, with the help of the httpdomain extension.

How to Generate the HTML Version of the Long-Form Documentation

If you want to generate the HTML version of the long-form documentation on your local machine, you need to have Sphinx and some Sphinx-contrib packages installed. To do that, go to a subdirectory of docs (e.g. docs/server) and do:

pip install -r requirements.txt

If you're building the Server docs (in docs/server) then you must also do:

pip install -e ../../

Note: Don't put -e ../../ in the requirements.txt file. That will work locally but not on ReadTheDocs.

You can then generate the HTML documentation in that subdirectory by doing:

make html

It should tell you where the generated documentation (HTML files) can be found. You can view it in your web browser.