Generating a documentation site from markup documents with Sphinx and Pandoc

Generating a fully fledged website from a set of markup documents is no easy feat. But thanks to the wonderful tool sphinx, it certainly makes the task easier. Sphinx does the heavy lifting of generating a website with built in javascript based search. But sometimes it’s not enough.

This week we were faced with two issues related to documentation generation on loklak_server and susi_server. First let me give you some context. Now sphinx requires an index.rst file within /docs/  which it uses to generate the first page of the site. A very obvious way to fill it which helps us avoid unnecessary duplication is to use the include directive of reStructuredText to include the README file from the root of the repository.

This leads to the following two problems:

  • Include directive can only properly include a reStructuredText, not a markdown document. Given a markdown document, it tries to parse the markdown as  reStructuredText which leads to errors.
  • Any relative links in README break when it is included in another folder.

To fix the first issue, I used pypandoc, a thin wrapper around Pandoc. Pandoc is a wonderful command line tool which allows us to convert documents from one markup format to another. From the official Pandoc website itself,

If you need to convert files from one markup format into another, pandoc is your swiss-army knife.

pypandoc requires a working installation of Pandoc, which can be downloaded and installed automatically using a single line of code.

pypandoc.download_pandoc()

This gives us a cross-platform way to download pandoc without worrying about the current platform. Now, pypandoc leaves the installer in the current working directory after download, which is fine locally, but creates a problem when run on remote systems like Travis. The installer could get committed accidently to the repository. To solve this, I had to take a look at source code for pypandoc and call an internal method, which pypandoc basically uses to set the name of the installer. I use that method to find out the name of the file and then delete it after installation is over. This is one of many benefits of open-source projects. Had pypandoc not been open source, I would not have been able to do that.

url = pypandoc.pandoc_download._get_pandoc_urls()[0][pf]
filename = url.split(‘/’)[-1]
os.remove(filename)

Here pf is the current platform which can be one of ‘win32’, ‘linux’, or ‘darwin’.

Now let’s take a look at our second issue. To solve that, I used regular expressions to capture any relative links. Capturing links were easy. All links in reStructuredText are in the same following format.

`Title <url>`__

Similarly links in markdown are in the following format

[Title](url)

Regular expressions were the perfect candidate to solve this. To detect which links was relative and need to be fixed, I checked which links start with the \docs\ directory and then all I had to do was remove the \docs prefix from those links.

A note about loklak and susi server project

Loklak is a server application which is able to collect messages from various sources, including twitter.

SUSI AI is an intelligent Open Source personal assistant. It is capable of chat and voice interaction and by using APIs to perform actions such as music playback, making to-do lists, setting alarms, streaming podcasts, playing audiobooks, and providing weather, traffic, and other real time information

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