The maintainers of |Flake8| believe strongly in benefit of style guides. Hence, for all contributors who wish to work on our documentation, we've put together a loose set of guidelines and best practices when adding to our documentation.
You can and should generate the docs locally before you submit a pull request with your changes. You can build the docs by running:
.. prompt:: bash tox -e docs
From the directory containing the tox.ini
file (which also contains the
docs/
directory that this file lives in).
Note
If the docs don't build locally, they will not build in our continuous integration system. We will generally not merge any pull request that fails continuous integration.
You should run the doc8
linter job before you're ready to commit and fix
any errors found.
We believe that by capitalizing |Flake8| in prose, we can help reduce
confusion between the command-line usage of flake8
and the project.
We also have defined a global replacement |Flake8|
that should be used
and will replace each instance with :program:`Flake8`
.
When documenting something on the command-line, use the .. prompt::
directive to make it easier for users to copy and paste into their terminal.
Example:
.. prompt:: bash
flake8 --select E123,W503 dir/
flake8 --ignore E24,W504 dir
We use a maximum line-length in our documentation that is similar to the default in |Flake8|. Please wrap lines at 79 characters (or less).
After the final paragraph of a section and before the next section title, use two new-lines to separate them. This makes reading the plain-text document a little nicer. Sphinx ignores these when rendering so they have no semantic meaning.
Example:
Section Header
==============
Paragraph.
Next Section Header
===================
Paragraph.
To indicate the title of a document, we place an equal number of =
symbols
on the lines before and after the title. For example:
==================================
Writing Documentation for Flake8
==================================
Note also that we "center" the title by adding a leading space and having
extra =
symbols at the end of those lines.
All of |Flake8|'s command-line options are documented in the User Guide. Each
option is documented individually using the .. option::
directive provided
by Sphinx. At the top of the document, in a reStructuredText comment, is a
template that should be copied and pasted into place when documening new
options.
Note
The ordering of the options page is the order that options are printed in the output of:
.. prompt:: bash flake8 --help
Please insert your option documentation according to that order.
Use link anchors to allow for other areas of the documentation to use the
:ref:
role for intralinking documentation. Example:
.. _use-anchors:
Use anchors for easy reference linking
======================================
Somewhere in this paragraph we will :ref:`reference anchors
<use-anchors>`.
Note
You do not need to provide custom text for the :ref:
if the title of
the section has a title that is sufficient.
|Flake8|'s documentation has three distinct (but not separate) audiences:
- Users
- Plugin Developers
- Flake8 Developers and Contributors
At the moment, you're one of the third group (because you're contributing or thinking of contributing).
Consider that most Users aren't very interested in the internal working of |Flake8|. When writing for Users, focus on how to do something or the behaviour of a certain piece of configuration or invocation.
Plugin developers will only care about the internals of |Flake8| as much as they will have to interact with that. Keep discussions of internal to the mininmum required.
Finally, Flake8 Developers and Contributors need to know how everything fits together. We don't need detail about every line of code, but cogent explanations and design specifications will help future developers understand the Hows and Whys of |Flake8|'s internal design.