Write Document and Tutorials

Write Document and Tutorials

We use the Sphinx for the main documentation. Sphinx support both the reStructuredText and markdown. When possible, we encourage to use reStructuredText as it has richer features. Note that the python doc-string and tutorials allow you to embed reStructuredText syntax.

Document Python

We use numpydoc format to document the function and classes. The following snippet gives an example docstring. We always document all the public functions, when necessary, provide an usage example of the features we support(as shown below).

def myfunction(arg1, arg2, arg3=3):
    """Briefly describe my function.

    Parameters
    ----------
    arg1 : Type1
        Description of arg1

    arg2 : Type2
        Description of arg2

    arg3 : Type3, optional
        Description of arg3

    Returns
    -------
    rv1 : RType1
        Description of return type one

    Examples
    --------
    .. code:: python

        # Example usage of myfunction
        x = myfunction(1, 2)
    """
    return rv1

Be careful to leave blank lines between sections of your documents. In the above case, there has to be a blank line before [Parameters]{.title-ref}, [Returns]{.title-ref} and [Examples]{.title-ref} in order for the doc to be built correctly. To add a new function to the doc, we need to add the sphinx.autodoc rules to the /docs/python_docs/python). You can refer to the existing files under this folder on how to add the functions.

Document C++

We use the doxgen format to document c++ functions. The following snippet shows an example of c++ docstring.

/*!
 * \brief Description of my function
 * \param arg1 Description of arg1
 * \param arg2 Description of arg2
 * \returns describe return value
 */
int myfunction(int arg1, int arg2) {
  // When necessary, also add comment to clarify internal logic
}

Besides documenting function usages, we also highly recommend contributors to add comments about code logic to improve readability.

Write Tutorials

We use the notedown to write Jupyter notebooks in Markdown as Python tutorials. You can find the source code under /docs/python_docs/python/tutorials.

The tutorial code will run on our build server to generate the document page and the tutorial page will show the result of executing the Jupyter notebook.

Application Examples

Our deep learning examples are maintained in apache/incubator-mxnet-examples and are checked regularly by CI to ensure quality.