Building the Documentation#

Prerequisites#

The documentation build process uses Doxygen and Sphinx along with a few extensions.

If you’re using Conda, the required software can be installed in a single line:

conda install -c conda-forge --file=ci/conda_env_sphinx.txt

Otherwise, you’ll first need to install Doxygen yourself (for example from your distribution’s official repositories, if using Linux). Then you can install the Python-based requirements with the following command:

pip install -r docs/requirements.txt

Building#

Note

If you are building the documentation on Windows, not all sections may build properly.

These two steps are mandatory and must be executed in order.

Process the C++ API using Doxygen
```
pushd cpp/apidoc
doxygen
popd
```
Build the complete documentation using Sphinx.

Note

This step requires the pyarrow library is installed in your python environment. One way to accomplish this is to follow the build instructions at Python Development and then run python setup.py install in arrow/python (it is best to do this in a dedicated conda/virtual environment).
```
pushd docs
make html
popd
```

Note

Note that building the documentation may fail if your build of pyarrow is not sufficiently comprehensive. Portions of the Python API documentation will also not build without CUDA support having been built.

After these steps are completed, the documentation is rendered in HTML format in docs/_build/html. In particular, you can point your browser at docs/_build/html/index.html to read the docs and review any changes you made.

Building with Docker#

You can use Archery to build the documentation within a Docker container.

archery docker run -v "${PWD}/docs:/build/docs" ubuntu-docs

The final output is located under the ${PWD}/docs directory.

Building a single directory for dev purposes without all the pre-requisites#

You can build documentation in a single directory without needing to install all of the pre-requisites by installing sphinx, setting up a temporary index in the directory you want to build and then building that directory.

The example below shows how to do this in the developers directory.

Install sphinx:

pip install sphinx

Create an temporary index file temp_index.rst file in the target directory:

echo $'.. toctree::\n\t:glob:\n\n\t*' > ./source/developers/temp_index.rst

Build the docs in the target directory:

sphinx-build ./source/developers ./source/developers/_build -c ./source -D master_doc=temp_index

This builds everything in the target directory to a folder inside of it called _build using the config file in the source directory.

Once you have verified the HTML documents, you can remove temporary index file:

rm ./source/developers/temp_index.rst

Benchmarks

Arrow Compute IR (Intermediate Representation)