KApiDox Installation Instructions
Dependencies
Required
Python 2 or 3 is required to run the scripts. Whichever version of python you use needs to have the jinja2 and yaml (or pyyaml) modules.
The following command should install them for the current user:
pip install --user PyYAML jinja2
Of course, you need Doxygen!
Optional
Doxyqml and doxypypy might be needed to let doxygen document respectevely qml and python sources.
To generate the dependency diagrams, you need the Graphviz Python bindings. They are currently not available from pip, but most distributions provide them. You can get binaries and source archives from https://www.graphviz.org/download/.
Installation
Unlike almost every other KDE module, kapidox does not use CMake. This is because it is purely written in Python, and so uses distutils. While it does not need to be installed to be used (see below), you can install kapidox with
python setup.py install
Note: For consistency, kapidox provides a CMakeLists.txt file, but this is just a wrapper around the setup.py script.
Writing documentation
Writing dox is beyond the scope of this documentation – see the notes at https://community.kde.org/Frameworks/Frameworks_Documentation_Policy and the doxygen manual. However, the script expects certain things to be present in the directory it is run on.
README.md
Most importantly, there should be a README.md file, like this page (backward compatibility also authorize Mainpage.dox files). The first line of this file is particularly important, as it will be used as the title of the documentation.
metainfo.yaml
A metainfo.yaml file is needed for the library to be generated. It should contain some metainformations about the library itself, its maintainers, where the sources are etc..
A very simple example can be:
A comprehensive list of the available keys can be found on this page.
By default, the source of the public library must be in src, if the documentation refers to any dot files, these should be in docs/dot. Images should be in docs/pics, and snippets of example code should be in examples. See the doxygen documentation for help on how to refer to these files from the dox comments in the source files.
If you need to override any doxygen settings, put them in docs/Doxyfile.local. A global settings file is defined in src/kapidox/data/Doxyfile.global.
Generating the documentation
The tool for generating dox is src/kapidox_generate. Simply point it at the folder you want to generate dox for (such as a framework checkout).
For example, if you have a checkout of KCoreAddons at ~/src/frameworks/kcoreaddons, you could run
~/src/frameworks/kapidox/src/kapidox_generate ~/src/frameworks/kcoreaddons
and it would create a documentation in the current directory.
The folders are recursively walked through, so you can also run it on ~/src/frameworks or ~/src. For a lot of libraries, the generation can last 15-30 minutes and be several hundreds of Mb, so be prepared!
Pass the –help argument to see options that control the behaviour of the script.
Note that on Windows, you will need to run something like
c:\python\python.exe c:\frameworks\kapidox\src\kapidox_generate c:\frameworks\kcoreaddons
Specific to frameworks (for now)
You can ask kgenframeworksapidox to generate dependency diagrams for all the frameworks. To do so, you must first generate Graphviz .dot files for all frameworks with the depdiagram-prepare tool, like this:
mkdir dot ~/src/frameworks/kapidox/src/depdiagram-prepare --all ~/src/frameworks dot
Then call kgenframeworksapidox with the --depdiagram-dot-dir option, like this:
mkdir frameworks-apidocs cd frameworks-apidocs ~/src/frameworks/kapidox/src/kapidox_generate --depdiagram-dot-dir ../dot ~/src/frameworks
More fine-grained tools are available for dependency diagrams. You can learn about them in depdiagrams.
Examples of generated pages:
- KDE API documentation: https://api.kde.org/