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:
cd doc
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.
If you have built numpy into a virtual environment and get an error
that says numpy not found, cannot build documentation without...,
you need to override the makefile PYTHON variable at the command
line, so instead of writing make html write:
make PYTHON=python html
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.