Question

I have a large number of python file and I would like to generate public API documentation for my project. All the functions that are part of the api I have decorated with a decorator.

for example:

@api
def post_comment(comment)"
    """ Posts a coment
    """
    pass

There are other public methods in the same classes. The API is spread among several files each file defining classes with methods and some methods have this @api decorator. How can I tell Sphinx to generate docs just for the public API?

Answer 1

I’m answering my own question… After some more had searching I found this:

https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/extensions/autodoc.html#skipping-members

Basically you can define a function in your conf.py file can look at each member and skip
all that don’t have the right decorator.

Here is a little example at the end of my conf.py file (this is the config file for sphinx):

def my_doc_skip(app, what, name, obj, skip, options):
    if what != "method":
        return True

    # if obj is decorated with @api
    #     return True
    # return False

def setup(app):
    app.connect('autodoc-process-docstring', my_process_docstring)
    app.connect('autodoc-skip-member', my_doc_skip)

You can also process the docstring with a function.