This is boilerplate for project documentation portal. Example can be seen here
This article, based on my experience, demonstrates approach of organizing
documentation in your project aiming following:
I am in software development for more than decade now. I used to work in a
different teams and on different projects, including the one, that was
transferred on support from other teams and even companies.
On of the biggest and most usual problems faced were lacking of project
documentation. In number of situations it was cause of the longer time needed to
take ownership over project. This is not usually failure of the team, sometimes
documentation is just not included into budget.
That’s why I always tried to include portions of the knowledge for future
support (even for myself in a few months or years)
Most often we are working with subset of diagrams, which are called informally
4+1 architectural view set, i.e.
Development view: Component, Package
Logical view: Activity, State,
Class
Physical view: deployment
Process: Activity, BPMN
Scenarios: Use Case
In a bigger projects, usually project manager decides what visualization
packages are used depending on his experience. I used to draw diagrams in MS
Visio, Edraw, yEd, Openoffice Draw, also number of online tools like Gliffy,
Lucida charts, draw.io etc.
Common issue I had — is constant feeling, that I would draw them much easier
with pencil and scan afterwards. On some more complex diagram set another
question I had was also “Hey how did I spend my working day today” :) As
diagrams also need to be constantly updated as software evolves, it was
sometimes hard to track differences in proprietary binary formats or even
constantly check diagrams differences online (like Gliffy, where versioning is
supported). On some projects we had google docs with number of diagram file
versions uploaded. If project used Confluence — it was probably the best case of
ever possible. On some projects we had just wiki provided by bitbucket …
For a quite long time I was looking for consistent approach, how to keep my
diagrams sources as simple as possible. Basically I had very basic set of
requirements:
Let me share with you current state of my findings:
Site: http://www.plantuml.com/
Dependencies: java, GraphViz package
Diagrams supported: UML set & a bit more
Tool is able to draw full set of UML diagrams, which makes it almost ideal,
although your sales person probably will not be happy from look. But for
purposes of documentation they are perfect:
But what is great, is that diagrams sources are pure text:
This allows you to put them together with code, for example as a block comment
to your module, easily track changes in a source control system, etc
Tool has number of integrations with variety of software:
http://plantuml.com/running from IDE, to wiki or
confluence.
You can try interactively how to draw diagrams now at
https://www.planttext.com/ or view few pre-created
diagrams at http://bit.ly/plantdiag
Site: http://www.blockdiag.com/
Dependencies: python 2+
Diagrams supported: blocks, sequences, activity,
network, rack, packet structure.
Activity diagram, for example, looks a way better than one generated by plantUML
Compared to PlantUML diagrams look better, but cons are that number of options
is much lower. From other hand, there are some specific kind of diagrams, like
packet structure, rack or just graphs — that make this tool ideal.
Site: http://www.sphinx-doc.org/
Dependencies:
python 2+
Pros: universal, including your own custom code to build the pages
Cons: plugins matter
PlantUML and Blockdiag are perfect tools, and can be used on their own, to
generate diagram images that you insert into your wikis afterwards.
But if you are looking for a full cycle solution for your project documentation
— take a look on Sphinx doc.
This is universal solution to be engine of project documentation for project of
any size, and my compete with wiki, confluence, and similar tools
Output formats: HTML (including Windows HTML Help), LaTeX (for printable PDF
versions), ePub, Texinfo, manual pages, plain text
Extensive cross-references: semantic markup and automatic links for
functions, classes, citations, glossary terms and similar pieces of information
Hierarchical structure: easy definition of a document tree, with automatic
links to siblings, parents and children
Automatic indices: general index as well as a language-specific module
indices
Code handling: automatic highlighting using the Pygments highlighter
Extensions: automatic testing of code snippets, inclusion of docstrings from
Python modules (API docs), and more
Contributed extensions: more than 50 extensions contributed by users in a
second repository; most of them installable from PyPI
Per my humble opinion, pros are:
At that moment I can’t skip cons you should take into consideration:
When I say, that “ReadTheDocs” theme is a cons — I mean, that probably the only
existing fully adapted theme for documentation is the one you saw hundred of
times:
As a result of experimenting I came with solution based on tools demonstrated
above. The demo of the deployed artifact probably tells more than a few
paragraphs:
[http://labs.voronenko.info/ProjectDocs/](http://labs.voronenko.info/Project
Most likely you are hitting:
error ValueError: —enable-jpeg requested but jpeg not found, aborting
solution: sudo apt-get install libjpeg-dev
zlib not found or libjpeg not found
solution: install dev packages using xcode-select --install ,
install jpeg-devel using brew install libjpeg
Take a look on https://github.com/Voronenko/projectdocs/blob/master/Dockerfile
it has listed all binary packages required. Check you have all of them or alternatives.
Formats convertor: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc
Example, to convert docs artifact:
pandoc -s flow.docx -t rst -o product_flow.rst
Converting markdown artifact:
pandoc --from=markdown --to=rst --output=README.rst README.md
PandaDoc online: https://pandoc.org/try/
Online work pad for diagramming construction
http://interactive.blockdiag.com/
Online work pad for UML diagrams construction
http://plantuml.com/plantuml/uml/
PlantUML learning pad with examples:
http://www.planttext.com/planttext
Generate pgsql schema diagram with schemacrawler http://sualeh.github.io/SchemaCrawler/ , example:
schemacrawler -server=postgresql -database=demo_test -user=postgres -password=postgres -infolevel=maximum -command=graph -outputformat=pdf -outputfile=database-diagram.pdf
Generate pgsql schema diagram portal with schemaspy http://schemaspy.sourceforge.net/ , example:
schemaspy -t pgsql -db demo_test -host localhost -port 5432 -s public -u postgres -p postgres -o output
Incorporate static code analysis into your project:
Doxygen:
https://github.com/michaeljones/breathe/tree/master
You have two options:
You would need:
diagramming software
At this moment it is enough to run ./clean_build.sh
Result will be produced out/html
You need to have docker installed. File ./docker_build.sh does similar task as clean_build.sh
#!/bin/bashDOCKER_UID=$(id -u)DOCKER_USER=$(whoami)RUNNING=$(docker inspect --format="{{ .State.Running }}" projectdocs 2> /dev/null)if [ $? -eq 1 ]; thenecho "PROJECTDOCS CONTAINER DOES NOT EXIST - CREATE IT"docker create -it -v $PWD:/opt/sphinxproject --name projectdocs softasap/sphinx-projectdocs:latest bashdocker start projectdocsecho projectdocs container createdfiif [ "$RUNNING" == "false" ]; thenecho "RUN PROJECTDOCS CONTAINER"docker start projectdocsecho projectdocs container runningfiecho "building docs"echo docker exec -it projectdocs bash -c "export DOCKER_UID=${DOCKER_UID} && export DOCKER_USER=${DOCKER_USER} && /opt/sphinxproject/docker_entry_point.sh"docker exec -it projectdocs bash -c "export DOCKER_UID=${DOCKER_UID} && export DOCKER_USER=${DOCKER_USER} && /opt/sphinxproject/docker_entry_point.sh"
make epub
Options for epub output
These options influence the epub output. As this builder derives from the HTML builder, the HTML options also apply where appropriate. The actual values for some of the options is not really important, they just have to be entered into the Dublin Core metadata.
epub_basename
The basename for the epub file. It defaults to the project name.
epub_theme
The HTML theme for the epub output. Since the default themes are not optimized for small screen space, using the same theme for HTML and epub output is usually not wise. This defaults to ‘epub’, a theme designed to save visual space.
epub_title
The title of the document. It defaults to the html_title option but can be set independently for epub creation.
epub_author
The author of the document. This is put in the Dublin Core metadata. The default value is ‘unknown’.
epub_language
The language of the document. This is put in the Dublin Core metadata. The default is the language option or ‘en’ if unset.
epub_publisher
The publisher of the document. This is put in the Dublin Core metadata. You may use any sensible string, e.g. the project homepage. The default value is ‘unknown’.
epub_copyright
The copyright of the document. It defaults to the copyright option but can be set independently for epub creation.
epub_identifier
An identifier for the document. This is put in the Dublin Core metadata. For published documents this is the ISBN number, but you can also use an alternative scheme, e.g. the project homepage. The default value is ‘unknown’.
epub_scheme
The publication scheme for the epub_identifier. This is put in the Dublin Core metadata. For published books the scheme is ‘ISBN’. If you use the project homepage, ‘URL’ seems reasonable. The default value is ‘unknown’.
epub_uid
A unique identifier for the document. This is put in the Dublin Core metadata. You may use a random string. The default value is ‘unknown’.
epub_cover
The cover page information. This is a tuple containing the filenames of the cover image and the html template. The rendered html cover page is inserted as the first item in the spine in content.opf. If the template filename is empty, no html cover page is created. No cover at all is created if the tuple is empty. Examples:
epub_cover = (‘_static/cover.png’, ‘epub-cover.html’)
epub_cover = (‘_static/cover.png’, ‘’)
epub_cover = ()
The default value is ().
New in version 1.1.
epub_pre_files
Additional files that should be inserted before the text generated by Sphinx. It is a list of tuples containing the file name and the title. If the title is empty, no entry is added to toc.ncx. Example:
epub_pre_files = [
(‘index.html’, ‘Welcome’),
]
The default value is [].
epub_post_files
Additional files that should be inserted after the text generated by Sphinx. It is a list of tuples containing the file name and the title. This option can be used to add an appendix. If the title is empty, no entry is added to toc.ncx. The default value is [].
epub_exclude_files
A list of files that are generated/copied in the build directory but should not be included in the epub file. The default value is [].
epub_tocdepth
The depth of the table of contents in the file toc.ncx. It should be an integer greater than zero. The default value is 3. Note: A deeply nested table of contents may be difficult to navigate.
epub_tocdup
This flag determines if a toc entry is inserted again at the beginning of it’s nested toc listing. This allows easier navitation to the top of a chapter, but can be confusing because it mixes entries of differnet depth in one list. The default value is True.
make mobi
The following configuration values can be used in conf.py. At a minimum, you must set the mobi_theme option:
mobi_add_visible_links
Whether or not to write out the full text of a hyperlink next to the link itself. If the document will be read on paper (or printed), it is a good idea to set this to True.
Default: True
mobi_author
The author of the book.
Default:
'unknown'
mobi_basename
The basename of the output file (the part of the filename that precedes .mobi)
Default: The project name, with spaces removed.
mobi_copyright
The copyright holder of the book.
Default: The value of copyright in
conf.py
mobi_cover
The cover image for the book. This should be in .jpg format.
Default: No cover image is used.
mobi_exclude_files
Default: no files are excluded.
mobi_identifier
Default:
'unknown'
mobi_language
Default: The value of language in
conf.py, or'en'if language is not set.
mobi_post_files
Default: no post files are used.
mobi_pre_files
Default: no pre files are used.
mobi_publisher
The publisher name for the book.
Default:
'unknown'
mobi_scheme
Default:
'unknown'
mobi_theme
Required. The mobi theme-file to use. If you don’t have a theme of your own, use the epub theme:
mobi_theme = 'epub'
mobi_title
Default: The value of html_title in
conf.py.
mobi_tocdepth
Default:
3.
mobi_tocdup
Default:
True
mobi_uid
Default:
'unknown'