Building the Documentation

Prerequisites

The documentation build process uses Doxygen and Sphinx along with a few extensions.

If you’re using Conda, the required software can be installed in a single line:

conda install -c conda-forge --file=ci/conda_env_sphinx.yml

Otherwise, you’ll first need to install Doxygen yourself (for example from your distribution’s official repositories, if using Linux). Then you can install the Python-based requirements with the following command:

pip install -r docs/requirements.txt

Building

Note

If you are building the documentation on Windows, not all sections may build properly.

These two steps are mandatory and must be executed in order.

1. Process the C++ API using Doxygen

   pushd cpp/apidoc
   doxygen
   popd
   

2. Build the complete documentation using Sphinx.

   Note

   This step requires the the pyarrow library is installed in your python environment. One way to accomplish this is to follow the build instructions at Python Development and then run python setup.py install in arrow/python (it is best to do this in a dedicated conda/virtual environment).

   pushd docs
   make html
   popd
   

After these steps are completed, the documentation is rendered in HTML format in docs/_build/html. In particular, you can point your browser at docs/_build/html/index.html to read the docs and review any changes you made.

Building with Docker

You can use Docker to build the documentation:

make -f Makefile.docker docs

The final output is located under docs/_build/html.