4.2. 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.

4.2.1. 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 you can use the Makefile located in the docs folder. The command make html will generate these pages in HTML. To automatically rebuild 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 command:

pip install sphinx-autobuild
sphinx-autobuild docs docs/_build/html --watch .

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.

4.2.2. 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"]
"""