Building the pipelines.lsst.io site locally

You can build the full pipelines.lsst.io site on your own computer. Although this is slightly more complicated than building documentation for a single package, it’s the best way to ensure that cross-package links work properly.

Alternatively, you can also build and publish a development version of pipelines.lsst.io with the sqre/infrastructure/documenteer Jenkins CI job. That Jenkins job only accepts development branches of the pipelines_lsst_io repository — not development branches of packages. The method described on this page is currently the only way to build documentation for development branches of packages with the full LSST Science Pipelines stack.

Prerequisites

Before starting, you’ll need a working lsst_distrib installation.

This installation needs to be a recent daily or weekly build so that any in-development packages will compile with the Stack. Working from the tip of the main branch is the norm for LSST software development.

The documentation build uses Documenteer and related Sphinx documentation packages, which are already installed if you are using the Rubin Conda developer environment. You can check if rubin-env-developer is installed by running mamba list rubin-env. If not, you can install the developer environment with: mamba install rubin-env-developer.

Clone and set up the pipelines_lsst_io repository

pipelines_lsst_io is the main documentation repository for the pipelines.lsst.io site. It contains project-wide content, like installation guides and release notes, and also provides the structure for gathering documentation content from individual packages in the LSST Science Pipelines package stack.

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/lsst/pipelines_lsst_io

Then set up the pipelines_lsst_io package with EUPS:

setup -k -r pipelines_lsst_io

Building the pipelines_lsst_io site

From the pipelines_lsst_io directory, use the stack-docs command-line app from Documenteer to build the documentation:

stack-docs build

The built site is located in the _build/html directory.

Cleaning up built documentation

You can clean up the built documentation and intermediate artifacts by running:

stack-docs clean

Cleaning up the build is useful if you need to force a rebuild of the documentation either because a previous build failed, or a docstring changed. Sphinx does not automatically invalidate its cache when docstrings change.

Adding a locally-developed package to the pipelines_lsst_io build

The pipelines_lsst_io build works by symlinking the doc/ directory contents of packages that are set up by EUPS. This means that by setting up a package, you can add it to your local pipelines_lsst_io build.

For this tutorial, you’ll use the pipe_base package as an example.

First, move out of the pipelines_lsst_io directory and clone pipe_base:

cd ..
git clone https://github.com/lsst/pipe_base

Then set up and compile pipe_base, while keeping other packages set up (the -k option):

cd pipe_base
setup -k -r .
scons

Then clean and build the pipelines_lsst_io documentation:

stack-docs -d ../pipelines_lsst_io clean
stack-docs -d ../pipelines_lsst_io build

Further reading