Welcome to sphinx-git’s documentation!¶

sphinx-git is an extension to the Sphinx documentation tool that allows you to include excerpts from your git history within your documentation. This could be used for release changelogs, to pick out specific examples of history in documentation, or just to surface what is happening in the project.

See Recent Changes below for an example of what can be done with it.

Contents¶

Getting Started¶

Including sphinx-git In Your Project¶

This guide assumes that you already have a Sphinx documentation project configured and building. If that is not the case, see the Sphinx documentation first and then come back.

Installing sphinx-git¶

The first thing you will need to do is install sphinx-git:

pip install sphinx-git

You may also want to include it in your setup.py or requirements.txt to ensure that sphinx-git is installed wherever you generate your documentation; each project will probably have a different way of doing this.

Including sphinx-git In Your Sphinx Configuration¶

Once you have installed sphinx-git, you need to configure Sphinx to look for it. Find the Sphinx conf.py which is used to generate your documentation. Somewhere in that file (generally towards the top), you will find the extensions setting. Add sphinx_git to this list (note the underscore):

extensions = ['sphinx_git']

Add A git Changelog To Your Project¶

All the hard parts are done, now you can add a git changelog to your project! Find a documentation file where you want it and add:

Recent Changes
--------------

.. git_changelog::

Build your documentation and, voila!, you have a git changelog right there in your docs!

There are a number of ways you can configure sphinx-git to output precisely what you want, which are outlined in the next section of the documentation.

Add Details of the Latest Commit to Your Project¶

You can also display information about the state of the repository when the documentation was compiled with the git_commit_detail directive:

.. git_commit_detail::
    :branch:
    :commit:

Using sphinx-git¶

Currently, sphinx-git provides two extensions to Sphinx: the git_changelog and git_commit_detail directives.

git_changelog Directive¶

The git_changelog directive produces a list of commits in the repository in which the documentation build is happening.

By default, it will output the most recent 10 commits. So:

.. git_changelog::

produces:

Prepare v10.1.1 release by Daniel Watkins at 2017-12-16 17:35:13

Make CHANGELOG formatting consistent by Daniel Watkins at 2017-12-16 17:34:10

Update CHANGELOG by Daniel Watkins at 2017-12-16 17:32:52

Merge pull request #47 from OddBloke/fix_rtd by Daniel Watkins at 2017-12-16 17:31:05
Handle detached HEADs

Fix operating on a detached HEAD by Daniel Watkins at 2017-12-16 17:27:27
This (a) should work, and (b) is the environment that ReadTheDocs builds in, so we need this to get updated docs.

Inline unnecessary method by Daniel Watkins at 2017-12-16 17:27:04

Prepare for development in next release by Daniel Watkins at 2017-12-16 17:12:28

Finalise v10.1.0 by Daniel Watkins at 2017-12-16 17:06:33

Merge pull request #46 from OddBloke/boeddeker by Daniel Watkins at 2017-12-15 23:10:39
Add repo-dir option plus tests

Add CHANGELOG entry by Daniel Watkins at 2017-12-15 23:06:57

As you can see, each revision has the message, author and date output in a list. If a commit has a detailed message (i.e. any part of the commit message that is not on the first line), that will be output below the list item for that commit.

Changing Number of Revisions in Output¶

If you want to change the number of revisions output by git_changelog, then you can specify the :revisions: argument. So:

.. git_changelog::
    :revisions: 2

produces:

Prepare v10.1.1 release by Daniel Watkins at 2017-12-16 17:35:13

Make CHANGELOG formatting consistent by Daniel Watkins at 2017-12-16 17:34:10

If you specify more revisions than the history contains, all revisions in the history will be displayed.

Specifying Range of Revisions to Output¶

If you want even more control over the output of git_changelog, then you can specify precisely the revisions you want included using the :rev-list: argument. So:

.. git_changelog::
    :rev-list: v3..v4

produces a list of all the commits between the v3 and v4 tags:

Add feature credits to CHANGELOG. by Daniel Watkins at 2013-11-16 23:08:14

Add v4 changelog entry. by Daniel Watkins at 2013-11-16 23:06:36

Merge pull request #10 from OddBloke/rev_list by OddBloke at 2013-11-16 23:02:41
Add the possiblity to specify commits using a rev-list parameter.

Make a couple of formatting changes. by Daniel Watkins at 2013-11-16 22:59:21

add rev-list explanation in README by Gregory Eric Sanderson at 2013-09-30 17:23:39

display a changelog using a range of commits by Gregory Eric Sanderson at 2013-09-30 17:06:15
Adds a new option ‘rev-list’. rev-list lets you define which commit to start from when displaying the changelog. You can use a tag, a branch, a commit hash, an explicit range, or anything else supported by git-rev-parse. Examples: .. git_changelog:: :rev-list: v1.0..HEAD .. git_changelog:: :rev-list: master..topicbranch Consult the man pages of git-rev-parse for more details on the syntax.

use a version of gitpython that provides iter_commits() by Gregory Eric Sanderson at 2013-09-30 17:04:34

Add CHANGELOG. by Daniel Watkins at 2013-07-07 08:35:43

Bump to v4 (for development). by Daniel Watkins at 2013-07-07 08:35:32

and:

.. git_changelog::
    :rev-list: v1

gives you a list of all commits up to the v1 tag (most of which involved me wrestling with setuptools):

I despise setuptools. by Daniel Watkins at 2012-07-09 16:46:00

Start again. by Daniel Watkins at 2012-07-09 16:39:20

Fix requirements. by Daniel Watkins at 2012-07-09 16:37:48

Add setup.py. by Daniel Watkins at 2012-07-09 16:34:03

Add README. by Daniel Watkins at 2012-07-09 16:33:18

Initial implementation. by Daniel Watkins at 2012-07-09 16:16:13

:rev-list: lets you specify revisions using anything that git rev-parse will accept. See the man page for details.

Warning

The :revisions: argument and the :rev-list: argument don’t play nicely together. :rev-list: will always take precedence, and all commits specified by the revision specification be output regardless of the :revisions: argument [1].

Sphinx will output a warning if you specify both.

Filter Revisons to Matching Only Certain Files Based on Filenames¶

If you only want to see the changelog regarding certain files (eg. for devops reasons you need to have both SaSS and CSS in your repository or you only want to see the changes made to the docs directory) you can use the :filename_filter: argument with git_changelog. :filename_filter: is expecting anything that can be evaluated as a regular expression. So:

.. git_changelog::
    :filename_filter: doc/.*\.rst

will produce the list of commits that modified documentation content.

Note

The :filename_filter: argument is compatible with both :revisions: and :rev-list:. Filtering on filenames is then performed on the selected (number of) revisions.

Preformatted Output for Detailed Messages¶

If you would prefer for the detailed commit messages to be output as preformatted text (e.g. if you include code samples in your commit messages), then you can specify this preference using the :detailed-message-pre: argument. So:

.. git_changelog::
    :rev-list: 3669419^..3669419
    :detailed-message-pre: True

becomes:

display a changelog using a range of commits by Gregory Eric Sanderson at 2013-09-30 17:06:15

Adds a new option 'rev-list'.
rev-list lets you define which commit to start from when displaying the
changelog. You can use a tag, a branch, a commit hash, an explicit
range, or anything else supported by git-rev-parse. Examples:

.. git_changelog::
    :rev-list: v1.0..HEAD

.. git_changelog::
    :rev-list: master..topicbranch

Consult the man pages of git-rev-parse for more details on the syntax.

Footnotes

[1]	Patches welcome!

git_commit_detail Directive¶

The git_commit_detail directive produces information about the current commit in the repository against which the documentation is being built. The following options are available:

branch: Display the branch name.
commit: Display the commit hash.
sha_length: Set the number of characters of the hash to display.
no_github_link: By default, if the repository’s origin remote is GitHub, the commit will link to the GitHub page for the commit. Use this option to disable this.
uncommitted: Show a warning if there are uncommitted changes in the repository.
untracked: Show a warning if there are untracked files in the repository directory.

For example:

.. git_commit_detail::
    :branch:
    :commit:
    :sha_length: 10
    :uncommitted:
    :untracked:

becomes

Commit: 466cd70261

Warning
There were uncommitted changes when this was compiled.

Enabling on Read the Docs¶

Read the Docs is an excellent website that hosts Sphinx-generated documentation (including the documentation for this project, which is probably where you are reading it). This document assumes that you already have your project configured on Read the Docs, using their default configuration [1].

As a custom extension, sphinx-git isn’t supported out-of-the-box by Read the Docs, but it is very easy to get it working!

Creating a Documentation Requirements File¶

The first thing you’ll need to do is create a pip requirements file for your documentation. Create a file containing:

sphinx-git

and commit it somewhere in your repository [2] (I will assume it is in requirements/doc.txt for the rest of this document).

Configuring Read the Docs¶

Navigate to the Read the Docs admin page for your project. This will be of the form https://readthedocs.org/dashboard/<PROJECT NAME>/edit/. Once on this page, you need to do two things:

Tick the box under “Use virtualenv”, so that Read the Docs will install our custom documentation requirements, and
Enter your documentation requirements file name in the “Requirements file” box (requirements/doc.txt from above).

Submitting the form should cause your project to be rebuilt, now with sphinx-git available!

Footnotes

[1]	Follow the Read the Docs getting started guide if you haven’t already.

[2]	You should probably pin that requirement to a specific version, but that is outside the scope of this documentation. This is probably a good place to start reading about it: http://nvie.com/posts/pin-your-packages/

Contributing¶

sphinx-git is already the work of more than just myself! There are a number of ways that you can contribute to the sphinx-git project.

Open Issues on GitHub¶

If there’s a problem with how sphinx-git works, or if there’s a feature that you’d like to see, open up an issue in GitHub. Give as much information as you can and I’ll do my best to get to it!

Submit a Patch¶

If you feel confident enough, have a stab at scratching your own itch in sphinx-git. Fork the project on GitHub, make your changes and submit a pull request.

Pull requests will need to pass the Travis CI build, which uses tox. You can run this by doing the following:

$ pip install tox
$ tox

This will run the build on all supported Python versions. If you’re on an environment that doesn’t have both available then do the best you can, and then open up your pull request; Travis will pick this up and build it for you.

Pull Request Checklist¶

Once you’ve got a patch ready, check the following things:

You’ve written tests for your change
The Travis CI build passes; this includes:
- PEP-8 on the sphinx_git package and the tests
- Pylint on the sphinx_git package
- Passing unit tests (of course!)
You’ve added a line to the CHANGELOG
You’ve added documentation (if appropriate)

Recent Changes¶

Prepare v10.1.1 release by Daniel Watkins at 2017-12-16 17:35:13
Make CHANGELOG formatting consistent by Daniel Watkins at 2017-12-16 17:34:10
Update CHANGELOG by Daniel Watkins at 2017-12-16 17:32:52
Merge pull request #47 from OddBloke/fix_rtd by Daniel Watkins at 2017-12-16 17:31:05
Handle detached HEADs
Fix operating on a detached HEAD by Daniel Watkins at 2017-12-16 17:27:27
This (a) should work, and (b) is the environment that ReadTheDocs builds in, so we need this to get updated docs.
Inline unnecessary method by Daniel Watkins at 2017-12-16 17:27:04
Prepare for development in next release by Daniel Watkins at 2017-12-16 17:12:28
Finalise v10.1.0 by Daniel Watkins at 2017-12-16 17:06:33
Merge pull request #46 from OddBloke/boeddeker by Daniel Watkins at 2017-12-15 23:10:39
Add repo-dir option plus tests
Add CHANGELOG entry by Daniel Watkins at 2017-12-15 23:06:57