Auto-documenting Django Models with Sphinx
In my sphinx documentation I really wanted a nice clean list of the fields on my Django models. The most obvious way of doing this is to add ":param blah:" tags to the docstring, but this takes a long time to implement and violates DRY principles when you already have lots of nice help text in the model definition. Another way is to use "#:" comments on attributes, but this approach suffers from the same issues as the previous method with the additional problem of Sphinx crapping out on file and custom fields. So anyway, this is my solution. It uses the Sphinx docstring processing callback to intercept any objects that inherit from django.models.Model and creates a nice param list of all the fields on that model. Param descriptions come from the field's help text or verbose name if no help text is defined. To use this, just add it to the end of your source/conf.py, filling out the project path as appropriate. You may be able to skip the Django environment setup lines if you're adding this to a Sphinx doc that already has Django models set up.
- sphinx
- introspection
- documentation
- docs
- autodoc