Building the NumPy API and reference docs

We currently use Sphinx for generating the API and reference documentation for NumPy. You will need Sphinx >= 2.2.0.

If you only want to get the documentation, note that pre-built versions can be found at

in several different formats.

Instructions

If you obtained NumPy via git, get also the git submodules that contain additional parts required for building the documentation:

git submodule update --init

In addition, building the documentation requires the Sphinx extension plot_directive, which is shipped with Matplotlib. This Sphinx extension can be installed by installing Matplotlib. You will also need Python>=3.6.

Since large parts of the main documentation are obtained from numpy via import numpy and examining the docstrings, you will need to first build NumPy, and install it so that the correct version is imported.

After NumPy is installed, install SciPy since some of the plots in the random module require scipy.special to display properly.

Note that you can eg. install NumPy to a temporary location and set the PYTHONPATH environment variable appropriately. Alternatively, if using Python virtual environments (via e.g. conda, virtualenv or the venv module), installing numpy into a new virtual environment is recommended. All of the necessary dependencies for building the NumPy docs can be installed with:

pip install -r doc_requirements.txt

Now you are ready to generate the docs, so write:

make html

in the doc/ directory. If all goes well, this will generate a build/html subdirectory containing the built documentation. If you get a message about installed numpy != current repo git version, you must either override the check by setting GITVER or re-install NumPy.

Note that building the documentation on Windows is currently not actively supported, though it should be possible. (See Sphinx documentation for more information.)

To build the PDF documentation, do instead:

make latex
make -C build/latex all-pdf

You will need to have Latex installed for this, inclusive of support for Greek letters. For example, on Ubuntu xenial texlive-lang-greek and cm-super are needed. Also latexmk is needed on non-Windows systems.

Instead of the above, you can also do:

make dist

which will rebuild NumPy, install it to a temporary location, and build the documentation in all formats. This will most likely again only work on Unix platforms.

The documentation for NumPy distributed at https://numpy.org/doc in html and pdf format is also built with make dist. See HOWTO RELEASE for details on how to update https://numpy.org/doc.

Sphinx extensions

NumPy’s documentation uses several custom extensions to Sphinx. These are shipped in the sphinxext/ directory (as git submodules, as discussed above), and are automatically enabled when building NumPy’s documentation.

If you want to make use of these extensions in third-party projects, they are available on PyPi as the numpydoc package.

A Guide to NumPy Documentation Reporting bugs