Configuring Python projects in documenteer.toml

If you are documenting a Python project that uses pyproject.toml (or setup.cfg and setup.py in legacy situations) to define its project metadata, you can re-use that metadata in your Sphinx configuration rather than repeating it in documenteer.toml by adding a project.python table

Walkthrough

This is a minimal documenteer.toml file for this project (Documenteer), where the Python package name is mypackage:

documenteer.toml

[project]
title = "My Package"
copyright = "2015-2022 Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. (AURA)"

[project.python]
package = "mypackage"

The key content from pyproject.toml looks like this:

../pyproject.toml

[project]
name = "mypackage"
# ...

[project.urls]
Homepage = "https://mypackage.lsst.io"
Source = "https://github.com/lsst/mypackage"

Notice how the [project] table in documenteer.toml is quite short because most information is found from the Python project metadata:

• version is inferred from the installed package’s metadata. If you use setuptools_scm, the version automatically increments with every commit or tag.

• base_url is inferred from the Homepage field in [project.urls] in pyproject.toml.

• github_url is inferred from the Source field in [project.urls] in pyproject.toml.

Important

The Python package must be installed in the environment where you run Sphinx to use this feature. For example, in your project’s GitHub Actions workflow you must install the package with pip install . before running Sphinx.

You cannot simply set the PYTHONPATH environment variable to add the package’s source tree. Internally, Documenteer uses importlib.metadata to read the installed package’s metadata. This is also why EUPS-installed packages are not supported by the [project.python] feature.

Overriding Python packaging metadata

You can always override the metadata from pyproject.toml by setting fields explicitly in the [project] table. For example, to fix the version as “1.0.0”:

documenteer.toml

[project]
title = "My Package"
copyright = "2015-2022 Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. (AURA)"
version = "1.0.0"

[project.python]
package = "mypackage"

Using alternative labels in pyproject.toml’s [project.urls]

Documenteer defaults to Homepage and Source as the labels for the documentation and GitHub homepages, respectively, in [project.urls] table of pyproject.toml. You can change these defaults in documenteer.toml:

documenteer.toml

[project]
title = "My Package"
copyright = "2015-2022 Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. (AURA)"

[project.python]
package = "mypackage"
documentation_url_key = "Docs"
github_url_key = "Repository"

And the corresponding pyproject.toml using those labels:

../pyproject.toml

[project]
name = "mypackage"
# ...

[project.urls]
Docs = "https://mypackage.lsst.io"
Repository = "https://github.com/lsst/mypackage"