LSST Design Documents Sphinx Theme

Forked from http://github.com/snide/sphinx_rtd_theme.

Contents

• Using it
• Changelog
  • 0.2.4 (2021-11-08)
  • 0.2.3 (2020-01-22)
  • v0.1.8
• How the Table of Contents builds
• Contributing or modifying the theme
  • Set up your environment

Using it

In your requirements.txt add:

lsst-dd-rtd-theme

In your conf.py file:

import lsst_dd_rtd_theme
html_theme = "lsst_dd_rtd_theme"
html_theme_path = [lsst_dd_rtd_theme.get_html_theme_path()]

Changelog

0.2.4 (2021-11-08)

• Fix unordered list formatting with recent dependency sets.

0.2.3 (2020-01-22)

• Modernize packaging with pyproject.toml and setup.cfg files. We're also using setuptools_scm now. In doing this, we've cleaned up many packaging metadata errors present in earlier releases.
• Use Travis CI to release to PyPI.

v0.1.8

• Start keeping changelog :)
• Support for third and fourth level headers in the sidebar
• Add support for Sphinx 1.3
• Add sidebar headers for :caption: in Sphinx toctree
• Clean up sidebar scrolling behavior so it never scrolls out of view

How the Table of Contents builds

Currently the left menu will build based upon any toctree(s) defined in your index.rst file. It outputs 2 levels of depth, which should give your visitors a high level of access to your docs. If no toctrees are set the theme reverts to sphinx's usual local toctree.

It's important to note that if you don't follow the same styling for your rST headers across your documents, the toctree will misbuild, and the resulting menu might not show the correct depth when it renders.

Also note that the table of contents is set with includehidden=true. This allows you to set a hidden toc in your index file with the hidden property that will allow you to build a toc without it rendering in your index.

By default, the navigation will "stick" to the screen as you scroll. However if your toc is vertically too large, it will revert to static positioning. To disable the sticky nav altogether change the setting in conf.py.

Contributing or modifying the theme

The lsst_dd_rtd_theme is primarily a sass project that requires a few other sass libraries. I'm using bower to manage these dependencies and sass to build the css. The good news is I have a very nice set of grunt operations that will not only load these dependencies, but watch for changes, rebuild the sphinx demo docs and build a distributable version of the theme. The bad news is this means you'll need to set up your environment similar to that of a front-end developer (vs. that of a python developer). That means installing node and ruby.

Set up your environment

1. Install sphinx into a virtual environment.

pip install sphinx

2. Install sass

gem install sass

2. Install node, bower and grunt.

// Install node
brew install node

// Install bower and grunt
npm install -g bower grunt-cli

// Now that everything is installed, let's install the theme dependecies.
npm install

Now that our environment is set up, make sure you're in your virtual environment, go to this repository in your terminal and run grunt:

grunt

This default task will do the following very cool things that make it worth the trouble.

1. It'll install and update any bower dependencies.
2. It'll run sphinx and build new docs.
3. It'll watch for changes to the sass files and build css from the changes.
4. It'll rebuild the sphinx docs anytime it notices a change to .rst, .html, .js or .css files.