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# Maintaining the documentation

The documentation for InaSAFE is written using ReSTructured text (.rst) and the Sphinx documenation builder. The best way to learn how to write .rst is to look at the source of existing documentation - the markup syntax is very simple. There are a number of useful tags that you can use to make your documentation clear and visually interesting, the more commonly used in this document are listed below. For a more detailed list, please visit the Spinx Inline Markup page

A complete list of supported .rst markup is also available here.

## Common tags

Here are some common useful tags:

    Heading
    =======

    SubHeading
    ----------

    Sub subheading
    ..............

    `web link<http://foo.org>`_

    :doc:filename  (rst file without  extension)

    *italics*

    **bold**

    .. note:: Note in a little call out box

    .. todo:: Todo item in a call out box

    .. table:: table title

    ============  ================
      Key         Allowed Values
    ============  ================
    units         m
    units         wet/dry
    units         feet
    ============  ================

    :menuselection:`Plugins --> Manage Plugins`

    :kbd:`Control-x Control-f`

    :guilabel:`Ok Button`

### Creating API Documentation

Each class method and function in the code base must include a docstring explaining its usage and purpose as per the example listed below (taken from the riab.py setupI18n method):

    """Setup internationalisation for the plugin.

    See if QGIS wants to override the system locale
    and then see if we can get a valid translation file
    for whatever locale is effectively being used.

    Args:
       thePreferredLocale - optional parameter which if set
           will override any other way of determining locale.
    Returns:
       None.
    Raises:
       no exceptions explicitly raised.
    """

There should be a blank line between each paragraph and before the Args option.

Where multiple inputs or outputs are used, a ReSTructured text bullet list should be used to list them.

Note

You can use any ReSTructured text withing the docstring to deliver rich markup in the final API documentation outputs.

In order for a new module’s documentation to appear in the API docs, the following steps are required:

- Create a new file in `docs/source/api-docs/<package_name>` named after the module. For example, for the gui/riab.py module we would create `docs/source/api-docs/gui/riab.rst` (note the .rst extension). See below for an example of its contents
- Add the new file to the API docs master index (`docs/source/api-docs/index.rst`). The .rst extension is not needed or desired when adding to the index list.
- Regenerate the documentation using the make docs command from the top level directory in the source tree.
- Add the new .rst file and generated html files to the revision control system.

Note

It is probably most expedient to simply copy and rename one of the existing API documentation files and replace the python module paths therein.

An example of the contents of a module’s API .rst if provided below:

    Module:  safe.common.polygon
    ============================

    .. automodule:: safe.common.polygon
          :members:

This module forms part of the InaSAFE tool.

A couple of things should be noted here:

- Sphinx provides automodule and autoclass directives. We have opted to use automodule for all API documentation because autoclass requires that each class be enumerated and anonymous functions need to be explicitly listed.
- Automodule must point to a fully qualified python module path.
- The members directive instructs autodocs to enumerate all classes and functions in that module.

Once the new document has been added and the documentation generated, you should see it appear in the API section of the InaSAFE documentation.

### Documenting new features

New features should be well documented and that documentation should be made available uder the `user-docs` subfolder of the sphinx sources tree.

For example, when the keywords editor dialog feature was introduced, we created a new sphinx document `docs/sources/user-docs/keywords.rst` which documents this new feature. Additionally, the help button is set to launch the help dialog in the context of the new help document e.g.:

    def showHelp(self):
       """Load the help text for the keywords gui"""
       if not self.helpDialog:
          self.helpDialog = RiabHelp(self.iface.mainWindow(), 'keywords')
       self.helpDialog.show()

Where the ‘keywords’ parameter indicates the user-docs/*.rst document that should be opened when the help button is clicked. The general style and approach used in existing documentation should inform your documentation process so that all the documentation is constent.

### Publishing the documentation to GitHub Pages

Initially we have used http://readthedocs.org to host our site (and the pages you are reading now). However they don’t support internationalisation and there are various other issues with it, so we opted to move our content into gh-pages. To use this, the site is stored in a special branch.

## Initial gh-pages setup

In order to set up the gh-pages branch this is the procedure followed.

Note

This is a once-off process you do not need to repeat it, it is here for reference purposes only.

Enable gh-pages in the gh project admin page. On your local system do something like this:

    git clone file:///home/timlinux/dev/python/inasafe-dev \
        inasafe-github-pages
    cd inasafe-github-pages
    cp ../inasafe-dev/.git/config .git/config
    git pull
    git symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/gh-pages
    rm .git/index
    git clean -fdx
    cp -r ../inasafe-dev/docs/build/html .
    cd html/
    touch .nojekyll
    git add .
    git commit -a -m "First commit of docs"
    git push origin gh-pages

Now wait ten minutes or so and the pages should be visble here at http://aifdr.github.com/inasafe/

See also: http://help.github.com/articles/creating-project-pages-manually

Deployment of the site requires the following steps:

- Update the documentation as needed
- Commit/push to master
- Run scripts/update_website.sh
- Apidoc are build automatically, this might update/create/remove some files. If it is the case, the script will ask you if you wish to commit those changes to master. Normally you should.
- Wait approximately 10 minutes

After this the changes should be visible here http://aifdr.github.com/inasafe/ and http://inasafe.org.

Also see http://github.com/AIFDR/inasafe/issues/257 for further details of how the documentation publishing process works.

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