Building the manual with Sphinx

This page explains how to build a local copy of the Godot manual using the Sphinx docs engine. This allows you to have local HTML files and build the documentation as a PDF, EPUB, or LaTeX file, for example. To get started, you need to:

1. godot-docs repository.
2. Sphinx
3. readthedocs.org theme.
4. godot-docs repository requirements.txt file. pip, Python’s package manager to install all these tools. It comes pre-installed with Python. Ensure that you install and use Python 3. Here are the commands to clone the repository and then install all requirements. Note python3 -m pip (Unix) or py -m pip (Windows) instead of pip3. If both approaches fail, check that you have pip3 installed.

   git clone https://github.com/godotengine/godot-docs.gitpip3 install -r requirements.txt

   With the programs installed, you can build the HTML documentation from the root folder of this repository with the following command:

   # On Linux and macOSmake html# On Windows, you need to execute the ``make.bat`` file instead.make.bat html

   If you run into errors, you may try the following command:

   make SPHINXBUILD=~/.local/bin/sphinx-build html

   Building the documentation requires at least 8 GB of RAM to run without disk swapping, which slows it down. If you have at least 16 GB of RAM, you can speed up compilation by running:

   # On Linux/macOSmake html SPHINXOPTS=-j2# On Windowsset SPHINXOPTS=-j2 && make html

   classes/ folder contains hundreds of files. _build/html/index.html in your web browser. MemoryError or EOFError, you can remove the classes/ folder and run make again. This will drop the class references from the final HTML documentation but will keep the rest intact. Note classes/ folder, do not use git add . when working on a pull request or the whole classes/ folder will be removed when you commit. See #3157 for more detail. Alternatively, you can build the documentation by running the sphinx-build program manually:

   sphinx-build -b html ./ _build

   You can also specify a list of files to build, which can greatly speed up compilation:

   sphinx-build -b html ./ _build classes/class_node.rst classes/class_resource.rst

   Building with Sphinx and virtualenv

   If you want your Sphinx installation scoped to the project, you can install sphinx-build using virtualenv. To do so, run this command from this repository’s root folder:

   virtualenv --system-site-packages env/. env/bin/activatepip3 install -r requirements.txt

   make html as shown above.