README.md
# GPflow documentation
## Read documentation online
[](http://gpflow.readthedocs.io/en/master/?badge=master)
[](http://gpflow.readthedocs.io/en/develop/?badge=develop)
We use readthedocs to build the online documentation, and have separate versions for the `master` and `develop` branches:
https://gpflow.readthedocs.io/en/master/ (for the latest official release e.g. on PyPI) and
https://gpflow.readthedocs.io/en/develop/ (for the latest cutting-edge code available from the develop branch on github).
## Compile documentation locally
To compile the GPflow documentation locally:
1. Change to this directory (e.g. `cd doc` if you are in the GPflow git repository's base directory)
2. Install doc dependencies
```
pip install sphinx sphinx_rtd_theme numpydoc nbsphinx sphinx_autodoc_typehints ipython jupytext jupyter_client ipywidgets
```
3. Install pandoc
```
pip install pandoc
```
If pandoc does not install via pip, or step 5 does not work, go to pandoc.org/installing.html (the PyPI package depends on the external system-wide installation of pandoc executables)
4. Generate auto-generated files
* Notebooks (.ipynb): run `make -C source/notebooks -j 4` (here with 4 parallel threads)
* API documentation (.rst): run `python source/generate_module_rst.py`
5. Compile the documentation
```
make html
```
6. Check documentation locally by opening (in a browser) build/html/index.html
## Setup for automatic documentation generation
Upon each merge to the `develop` branch, this repository's [CircleCI configuration](../.circleci/config.yml) runs the `trigger-docs-generation` step
which triggers a CircleCI build on the [GPflow/docs repository](https://github.com/GPflow/docs).
This clones the latest GPflow develop branch and compiles all notebooks from jupytext to .ipynb
(setting the `DOCS` environment variable so that notebook optimisations are run to convergence)
and runs the `generate_module_rst.py` script as above to generate the .rst files for API documentation.
(This script is run on CircleCI, instead of ReadTheDocs, as it requires gpflow and hence `tensorflow` and `tensorflow_probability` to be installed, but TensorFlow is too large to be installed inside the ReadTheDocs docker images.)
ReadTheDocs then pulls in these auto-generated files as well as all other files within this doc/ directory to actually build the documentation using Sphinx.
