Sphinx autodoc not importing anything?

Question

I'm trying to use sphinx (in conjunction with autodoc and numpydoc) to document my module, but after the basic setup, running make html produces just the basic html with nothing from the docstrings included. I'm running Python 3.3, the outline of the project structure is as follows:

Kineticlib
|--docs
|  |--build
|  |--source
|  |  |--conf.py
|--src
|  |--kineticmulti
|  |  |--__init__.py
|  |  |--file1.py
|  |  |--file2.py
|--setup.py

__init__.py is empty, and in conf.py in the docs/source directory I've added sys.path.insert(0, os.path.abspath('../..'))

Running make html in the docs directory gives the following output:

sphinx-build -b html -d build/doctrees   source build/html
Running Sphinx v1.2.2
loading pickled environment... done
building [html]: targets for 0 source files that are out of date
updating environment: 0 added, 0 changed, 0 removed
looking for now-outdated files... none found
no targets are out of date.

Build finished. The HTML pages are in build/html.

So, what am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Did you run sphinx-apidoc in the docs/source directory? This will generate the .rst files used to make the html. From man sphinx-apidoc,

sphinx-apidoc [options] -o <outputdir> <sourcedir> [pathnames ...]

You'll need to include (at a minimum) the outputdir (where the .rst files will go, ./ should work) and the sourcedir which should point to your package (looks like ../../src/kineticmulti should work)

Answer 2

As it is being said you should do:

sphinx-apidoc [options] -o <outputdir> <sourcedir> [pathnames ...]

Sometime modifying your conf.py to import some source modules are also needed. As well as adding some docs to class in order to load its method docs (can be true only for private classed, but I've been stuck on that).