This document gives an overview of how the Sphinx documentation for ZFSBootMenu works.

The Makefile alongside this document provides several targets to prepare the Sphinx environment and render documentation.

Python 3 and several Python 3 packages are needed (see requirements.txt for a complete list). These packages can be installed through your system package manager or via pip in a virtual environment with make setup.

Some make targets require further programs: watchexec for make serve and rst2ansi for make gen-man.

On Void Linux, make setup-void will install these programs and set up the virtual environment.

Generally, the commands to build the documentation are make html (to build the web documentation) and make man (to build the manpages).

Several special targets exist too:

• make serve can be used to build and locally serve the web documentation using Python's built-in webserver.
• make gen-man can be used to build the manpages and update them in /docs/man/dist.

See make help for a list of all possible targets.

• make clean will clean up the generated documentation.
• make envclean will clean up the virtual environment.
• make clean-void will clean up the virtual environment and remove any installed packages.

• conf.py: the Sphinx configuration file
• index.rst: the main page, and where the primary toctrees are listed
• CHANGELOG.md: the changelog for ZFSBootMenu
• general: where most documentation should reside. Documents about various topics, including various configuration options
  • general/_include/ contains various documentation snippets
• guides: Documents about installation on various distros
  • guides/_include/ contains distribution agonostic snippets
  • guides/<distro>/_include/ contains distribution specific snippets
• man: manpages
• online: documentation primarily to be shown within ZFSBootMenu's help system
• _static: various static files for use within the documentation

• Most pages are written in reStructuredText (RST) format
• Some (like the changelog) are written in markdown for compatibility, so markdown is supported but RST is preferred
• When possible, keep lines limited to 120 characters, and use 2 spaces for indentation

To link to files within the ZFSBootMenu repository, use the :zbm: macro:

:zbm:`title <bin/generate-zbm>`
:zbm:`bin/generate-zbm`

will both create a link to the file /bin/generate-zbm on GitHub.

reStructuredText allows various forms of section heading syntax. In this documentation, use:

Level 1:

My Title
========

Level 2:

My Title
--------

Level 3:

My Title
~~~~~~~~

Level 4:

My Title
^^^^^^^^

Also, the number of characters in the underline should match the number of characters in the title.

To get a good overview of reStructuredText and Sphinx, take a look at the following resources:

• reStructuredText Primer
• reStructuredText Directives
• Docutils reStructuredText Documentation