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.

Before you get started, make sure that you have:

Git
make (unless you're using Windows)
Python 3

Note

Python 3 should come with the pip3 command. You may need to write python3 -m pip (Unix) or py -m pip (Windows) instead of pip3. If both approaches fail, make sure that you have pip3 installed.

(Optional) Set up a virtual environment. Virtual environments prevent potential conflicts between the Python packages in requirements.txt and other Python packages that are installed on your system.
1. Create the virtual environment:
  py -m venv godot-docs-venv
  python3 -m venv godot-docs-venv
2. Activate the virtual environment:
  godot-docs-venv\Scripts\activate.bat
  source godot-docs-venv/bin/activate
3. (Optional) Update pre-installed packages:
  py -m pip install --upgrade pip setuptools
  pip3 install --upgrade pip setuptools

Clone the docs repo:

git clone https://github.com/godotengine/godot-docs.git

Change directory into the docs repo:
```
cd godot-docs
```
Install the required packages:
```
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
```
Build the docs:
```
make html
```
Note

On Windows, that command will run make.bat instead of GNU Make (or an alternative).

Alternatively, you can build the documentation by running the sphinx-build program manually:
```
sphinx-build -b html ./ _build/html
```

The compilation will take some time as the classes/ folder contains hundreds of files. See Hints for performance.

You can then browse the documentation by opening _build/html/index.html in your web browser.

Dealing with errors¶

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

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

If you get a 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.

Important

If you delete the 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.

Hints for performance¶

RAM usage¶

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:

set SPHINXOPTS=-j2 && make html

make html SPHINXOPTS=-j2

You can use -j auto to use all available CPU threads, but this can use a lot of RAM if you have a lot of CPU threads. For instance, on a system with 32 CPU threads, -j auto (which corresponds to -j 32 here) can require 20+ GB of RAM for Sphinx alone.

Specifying a list of files¶

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

make FILELIST='classes/class_node.rst classes/class_resource.rst' html