Editing the Developer Documentation

About

The doc/dev directory in FreedomBox repository contains the FreedomBox Developer Manual. Specifically the tutorial for writing new applications and API reference for writing apps for FreedomBox. It is kept as part of the main FreedomBox source code with the expectation that when the API changes the developer documentation is also updated in the same patch set.

Setup on Debian

Install the following Debian packages:

  • python3-sphinx

  • python3-sphinx-autobuild

If your preferred text editor doesn’t have support for the reStructuredText format, you can install a simple desktop application called ReText. It has live preview support with split panes.

Viewing changes live in your browser

You do not need the virtual machine used for FreedomBox development running to edit this documentation.

Run make livehtml from the current directory in the host machine. Visit http://127.0.0.1:8000 to view the changes live in your browser as you edit the .rst files in this directory. Your browser reloads the page automatically each time you save an .rst file in the documentation.