7.2. Documentation

The vantage6 framework is documented on this website. Additionally, there is API Documenation with OAS3+. This documentation is shipped directly with the server instance. All of these documentation pages are described in more detail below.

7.2.1. How this documentation is created

The source of the documentation you are currently reading is located here, in the docs folder of the vantage6 repository itself.

To build the documentation locally, there are two options. To build a static version, you can do make html when you are in the docs directory. If you want to automatically refresh the documentation whenever you make a change, you can use sphinx-autobuild. Assuming you are in the main directory of the repository, run the following commands:

pip install -r docs/requirements.txt
sphinx-autobuild docs docs/_build/html --watch .

Of course, you only have to install the requirements if you had not done so before.

Note

This documentation also includes some UML diagrams which are generated using PlantUML. To generate these diagrams, you need to install Java. PlantUML itself is included in the Python requirements, so you do not have to install it separately.

Then you can access the documentation on http://127.0.0.1:8000. The --watch option makes sure that if you make changes to either the documentation text or the docstrings, the documentation pages will also be reloaded.

This documentation is automatically built and published on a commit (on certain branches, including main). Both Frank and Bart have access to the vantage6 project when logged into readthedocs. Here they can manage which branches are to be synced, manage the webhook used to trigger a build, and some other -less important- settings.

The files in this documentation use the rst format, to see the syntax view this cheatsheet.

7.2.2. API Documenation with OAS3+

The API documentation is hosted at the server at the /apidocs endpoint. This documentation is generated from the docstrings using Flasgger. The source of this documentation can be found in the docstrings of the API functions.

If you are unfamiliar with OAS3+, note that it was formerly known as Swagger.

An example of such a docsting:

"""Summary of the endpoint
   ---
   description: >-
       Short description on what the endpoint does, and which users have
       access or which permissions are required.

   parameters:
       - in: path
         name: id
         schema:
           type: integer
         description: some identifier
         required: true

   responses:
       200:
           description: Ok
       401:
           description: Unauthorized or missing permission

   security:
       - bearerAuth: []

   tags: ["Group"]
"""