Common Astronomy Software Applications Documentation

• view latest master build at: https://casadocs.readthedocs.io/en/latest
• view stable release build at: https://casadocs.readthedocs.io/en/stable

A new documentation build is triggered for every commit to the repository. It can take 5 to 10 minutes to complete.

Most of the casadocs content is written in markdown format using the Google Colab web service to edit Jupyter notebooks of text cells. Jupyter notebook pages have a link at the top to "Open in Colab" for editing. Modified pages can be saved back in to the casadocs repository from the Colab window under File -> Save a copy in Github.

The nbsphinx package is used to convert notebooks to Sphinx/readthedocs format. There is some special markdown syntax available that may not render in Google Colab. For the complete set of markdown syntax avaiable, go here:

• https://nbsphinx.readthedocs.io/en/0.7.1/markdown-cells.html

API content is generally created by combining xml from the CASA source code repository with ReStructuredText (rst) files held in the casadocs repository. The xml can only be updated through development branches of the source code, while the rst files can be edited directly in the Github repository browser window.

• Task descriptions can be found under docs/tasks
• Tool descriptions can be found under docs/tools
• Shell descriptions can be found under docs/api/casashell

Sphinx RST syntax and examples can be found here:

• https://sphinx-rtd-theme.readthedocs.io/en/stable/demo/demo.html

When the XML is updated in the CASA source code repo, the files need to be synced back to the casadocs repo. This is done through a manually triggered Github Action rather than automatically to allow for specific updates to different release branches if necessary.

To update the xml file sync from the CASA source code repo, go to the Actions tab in Github, select Update_XML and click Run Workflow

Verify the files have been updated by navigating to the xml folder in the root of the Github repo.

Tasks will only appear in the readthedocs site if they have both an xml file in the xml folder and a matching rst file in the docs/tasks folder. A task can be removed or hidden from readthedocs by deleting or renaming the rst file to something that does not match the xml file name.

When a new task is added to CASA, the new xml file will be picked up by the Action described above. A new rst file must also be added to docs/tasks using the same format as the others (with sections for Description/Examples/Developer).

This should not be necessary and is here only for reference on how to regenerate the original content from Plone.

1. Scrape the latest Plone CASAdocs (creates html folder):

   $: scrapy crawl sitemap
   $: docker run -p 8050:8050 scrapinghub/splash
   $: scrapy crawl full
   

2. Generate content pages (creates markdown folder)

   $: python scripts/convert_html.py
   

3. Generate notebook files (creates docs/notebooks folder)

   $: python scripts/build_notebooks.py
   

4. Locally build pages to verify (this will also call scripts/parse_task_xml.py)

   $: cd docs
   $: sphinx-build -a -E -b html . ./build