Question

Is there a way to install/generate the documentation for the packages installed using pip?

I wish to install all the required packages for a project, as well as all the associated documentation (e.g. Django documentation when installing django, dateutil documentation with dateutil etc.).

Pip requirements files are a great way of quickly installing the required packages for a project, but it would be even better if I could also install all the associated docs as well.

Ubuntu Python packages install documentation to /usr/share/docs, but pip does not appear to do the same.

Documentation for these packages is important to me for when I need to work on projects offline.

Answer 1

I think you’re looking for an equivalent to the way that ruby automatically (unless suppressed) generates rdoc from installed gems/packages.

In python, there is a standardized mechanism for annotating code with documentation — docstrings with optional formatting. However there isn’t a standardized way of generating/storing documentation from python code. Each python package may have a different mechanism, so there couldn’t be a way for pip to generate it.