Announcing pydoc.io beta¶

Today we’re excited to announce our latest project: https://pydoc.io. This work was made possible by the MOSS Grant from Mozilla. Thanks to Mozilla for funding our time building this wonderful community resource.

About pydoc.io¶ Running Read the Docs, we’ve always been proud of the documentation tooling that the Python community has. We prioritize prose over API documentation listings, and generally have a high standard of documentation in our projects. There are a specific set of use cases that API reference documentation support, and the Python community doesn’t support them well. Tools like http://godoc.org and http://rubydoc.info provide these for others languages, and we now introduce http://pydoc.io as the Python community’s version of that.

What is it?¶ Pydoc.io will eventually auto-generate API reference documentation for every package on PyPI. Our beta release will support a limited set of packages that we are using for testing. Over time we’ll expand the tooling to automatically support generating docs for any package posted on PyPI. Reference documentation is wonderful for folks who already know how a library works, and simply want to use it. It’s also great for navigating and understanding the internals of a piece of code. Giving them simple access to nicely rendered API documentation supports using and understanding libraries in a nicer way than reading code. We’re happy to build out these tools, along with the wonderful prose tools we’ve always had with Sphinx itself. Our progress and some context is tracked in issue 1957.

Give us feedback¶ This is a very beta release. We have developed a few different sets of tools, and would love your feedback. In particular: Give us examples of API documentation patterns that you like. We’d like to incorporate powerful patterns into our theme.

Don’t give us feedback on specific design issues with the theme, we’re still working on it!

Let us know if you have ideas about how we can improve the general usability of the documentation

Let us know features that you wish the site had