Creating Documentation from Python Source Files with Doxygen and doxypy

I was recently generating some documentation from the Entertainer source code and decided to share how I managed to do it.

I’m assuming python 2.4 is installed on your system.

First install doxygen and graphviz

sudo apt-get install doxygen graphviz

Download the latest version of doxypy from http://code.foosel.org/doxypy and extract to a suitable location.

I used doxypy-0.3rc2.tar.gz

Now we need to generate a configuration file, to do this run the following from your project root folder

doxygen -g config.dox

Edit the file and set the following tags:

PROJECT_NAME = #Your Project Name would go here
PROJECT_NUMBER = #Your version/revision number goes here
OUTPUT_DIRECTORY = #Where you want the documentation going
FILE_PATTERNS = *.py
RECURSIVE = YES
INPUT_FILTER = "python /path/to/doxypy.py" #set this to where you extracted doxypy
FILTER_SOURCE_FILES = YES
INPUT = #where the source files are

If you want graphs also edit the following:

HIDE_UNDOC_RELATIONS = NO
HAVE_DOT = YES
CALL_GRAPH = YES
CALLER_GRAPH = YES

Run the following:

whereis dot
and enter the output into the following config tag:

DOT_PATH = /usr/bin/dot

Next ones are optional:

MULTILINE_CPP_IS_BRIEF = YES
DETAILS_AT_TOP = YES
EXTRACT_ALL = YES
EXTRACT_STATIC = YES
SHOW_DIRECTORIES = YES
SOURCE_BROWSER = YES
ALPHABETICAL_INDEX = YES
COLS_IN_ALPHA_INDEX = 8
TOC_EXPAND = YES
DISABLE_INDEX = YES
GENERATE_TREEVIEW = YES
GENERATE_LATEX =YES

All set up now…

All we need to do now whenever you want to generate/regenerate the documentation is to run the following from the project root folder:

doxygen config.dox

Thanks to internetducttape.com as I used this blog entry as a starting point.

Tags: Documentation, Doxygen, Entertainer, Linux, Python, Tutorial

This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 3:01 pm and is filed under IT and Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.