Mozilla Source Tree Documentation

Managing Documentation

This documentation is generated via the Sphinx tool from sources in the tree.

To build the documentation, run mach doc. Run mach help doc to see configurable options.

Adding Documentation

To add new documentation, define the SPHINX_TREES and SPHINX_PYTHON_PACKAGE_DIRS variables in moz.build files in the tree and documentation will automatically get picked up.

Say you have a directory featureX you would like to write some documentation for. Here are the steps to create Sphinx documentation for it:

  1. Create a directory for the docs. This is typically docs. e.g. featureX/docs.
  2. Create an index.rst file in this directory. The index.rst file is the root documentation for that section. See build/docs/index.rst for an example file.
  3. In a moz.build file (typically the one in the parent directory of the docs directory), define SPHINX_TREES to hook up the plumbing. e.g. SPHINX_TREES['featureX'] = 'docs'. This says the ``docs`` directory under the current directory should be installed into the Sphinx documentation tree under ``/featureX``.
  4. If you have Python packages you would like to generate Python API documentation for, you can use SPHINX_PYTHON_PACKAGE_DIRS to declare directories containing Python packages. e.g. SPHINX_PYTHON_PACKAGE_DIRS += ['mozpackage'].

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