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

INFO

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.

1. (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

   2. Activate the virtual environment:

      godot-docs-venv\Scripts\activate.bat

   3. (Optional) Update pre-installed packages:

      py -m pip install --upgrade pip setuptools

2. Clone the docs repo:

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

3. Change directory into the docs repo:

   cd godot-docs

4. Install the required packages:

   pip3 install -r requirements.txt

5. Build the docs:

   make html

   INFO

   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.

INFO

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

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