Installing Python package documentation

Question

I'm publishing a few Python packages internally and I would like to include API documentation, currently in .rst form, but might go for Sphinx-generated HTML in the future. I need more details than I can reasonably put into a docstring (background info, tutorial examples, etc), so I've written it out long-hand.

I have a simple distutils-based setup.py where I pull in the text files, but I'm not sure where to put them on the target system (I target Windows, Linux and Mac.)

Is there a convention in the Python world for installing API docs alongside packages? Or are docs generally assumed to only be available online?

Any ideas welcome, thanks!

Answer 1

Installing docs is not supported by distutils. These days it seems more important to publish them online than to install them on the target system though, so if you’re set up to use Reat The Docs or upload docs to PyPI, you’re good.