README.rst

orphan:

The doc folder

The documentation for NEST is contained in this folder. We are currently working on improving the documentation and making updates. However, if you notice something out of place, you can submit an issue in our GitHub repository.

Build the docs locally

You will need the NEST source code in your project:

cd nest-simulator/doc/

Requirements for building the docs include:

python3
setuptools
pandoc
sphinx
recommonmark
sphinx-rtd-theme
nbsphinx
breathe
sphinx-gallery
ipython
mock

You can now build the docs using this command (make sure you are in the doc folder):

make html

Once this complete, you can open _build/html/index.html to view the docs!

xdg-open _build/html/index.html

For developer documentation, we use doxygen comments extensively throughout NEST. After installing NEST, you can extract comments from the source code with make doc and a doxygen folder with html files will be generated in the doc folder in your source directory.

For a list of commands for SLI and C++, you can access the the online command index via the command line

import nest
nest.helpdesk()

Note

The command helpdesk() needs to know which browser to launch in order to display the help pages. The browser is set as an option of helpdesk. Please see the file ~/.nestrc for an example setting firefox as browser. Please note that the command helpdesk does not work if you have compiled NEST with MPI support, but you have to enter the address of the helpdesk (file:///install/path/share/doc/nest/index.html) manually into the browser. Please replace /install/path with the path under which NEST is installed.

Local install of user documentation

If you are using Linux or macOS and want to locally install the docs and generate the html files, follow the steps below.

Requirements

To keep everything simple and easy to maintain, the installation with conda is described here. So all you need is conda. If you don’t have it yet, miniconda is recommended.

Installation

With the following steps a full development environment is installed - even the newest NEST release.

Change to the doc/ folder in the source directory (if you’re not already there).

cd ./doc

Create and activate the environment.

conda env create -f nest_doc_conda_env.yml
conda update -n base conda
conda activate nest_doc

Now generate the html files. They are then located in ./docs/_build/html.

make html

If you want to deactivate and/or delete the build environment:

conda deactivate
conda remove --name nest_doc --all