Notes from
the Instructor

General installation help: 6:30-8:00PM Tuesday & Wednesday in Open Spaces.

Documenting Your Project With Sphinx

No, you are not dreaming! The week of PyCon 2012 is finally here, and on Thursday morning you will be surrounded by two dozen other attendees to learn about how Sphinx can help you write friendly documentation.

Whatever brand of laptop you will be bringing, you can save valuable time in the tutorial by going ahead and getting Sphinx installed before you even arrive at PyCon.

• Installing Sphinx before the tutorial means you can walk in and immediately start learning
• The instructor is happy to help you with any problems
• Go ahead and try installing today, and simply email the instructor if you run into any issues or errors (his email is at the bottom of this page)
• As noted above, installation help will be available on both of the two evenings before the tutorial

So what are the typical steps to doing an install? Typically, a Python programmer installs a package that she would like to try out by creating a new virtual environment, and then using the pip command inside to perform the install. If you do not already have the virtual environment tool installed on your system, do not worry! It works fine when downloaded as a stand-alone script.

Here are the install steps:

• Download virtualenv.py
• Run the script to create a virtual environment and install Sphinx, then test to be sure that it works (note that on Windows, the directory containing the commands will be Scripts\ instead of bin/ so adjust the last two commands accordingly):

  python virtualenv.py sphinxenv
  cd sphinxenv
  bin/pip install Sphinx
  bin/sphinx-quickstart
  

• If you have installed successfully, the quick-start command will have started running and asked you to enter the root path for your new documentation; simply press Control-C to cancel the action.

Again, just let me know if you have any problems. Otherwise, I will see you bright and early on Thursday morning!

brandon@rhodesmill.org