Pepijn
2e8345a5cc
LeRobot's documentation build passes `--not_python_module`, which tells doc-builder there is no importable Python package and disables `[[autodoc]]` entirely. The result is that all 90+ pages are hand-written guides and there is no generated API reference at all. This is the machinery to change that. It deliberately contains no docstring changes of its own — every docstring edit lives in the follow-up PR, so this one can be reviewed as tooling and configuration alone. **The standard.** `docs/source/writing_docstrings.mdx` is the contract: Google section headers with Hugging Face type formatting, the machine-checked argument line, `**Attributes**:`, doc-builder cross-references, fenced doctest examples. It also records three behaviours that are not discoverable from the source and were verified against a local build: `[[autodoc]]` silently skips members with no docstring; doc-builder does not inherit docstrings from base classes, so a registered config shim whose body is `pass` renders every field with no description; and module-level aliases resolve to the canonical class. **Autodoc turned on**, with two changes that are not obvious: - `--version main` on the main-docs job. Without `--not_python_module`, doc-builder resolves the version from `lerobot.__version__` and only maps it to the default branch when it contains "dev". transformers relies on that; our main carries 0.6.2. Verified by building both ways — dropping the flag alone would publish the main docs to /lerobot/v0.6.2/ instead of /lerobot/main/ and disable notebook building. - `pre_command` on both jobs. doc-builder ships a mock-deps registry entry for lerobot, so the reusable workflow takes its light-install path, which cannot import the package. The heavy dependencies cannot be mocked either: draccus runs `register_subclass` at import time and `processor/converters.py` calls `functools.singledispatch.register(torch.Tensor)`, which needs a real class. `[dataset]` is the only extra required. Workflow triggers gain `src/**`, since the reference is now generated from docstrings. `docs/source/api/` is excluded from the prettier hook, which reads `[[autodoc]]` member lists as lazy paragraph continuations and joins a ten-entry list onto one line. Nine API reference pages, scaffolded with each module's base class. **Doctests.** `LeRobotDocTestParser` is mandatory rather than optional here: ruff's `docstring-code-format = true` drops the blank line before a closing fence, after which stdlib's `_EXAMPLE_RE` reads the fence as expected output and every example with output fails. It is written against the installed pytest rather than copied from transformers, whose version predates pytest 9's `import_path` signature and its own fix for the `@property` line-number bug. `preprocess_string` also diverges: the upstream fenced-block split puts a single-line example's code in a chunk with no `>>>` in it, so neither the CUDA skip nor the `+IGNORE_RESULT` injection fires for it. **Checkers.** `utils/check_docstrings.py` is the ~300-line core of the 2203-line transformers original; the `@auto_docstring` system, modular propagation, GitPython and `checkers.py` are not ported. `utils/check_config_docstrings.py` checks that every registered robot config documents its port and calibration semantics. **Gates**, all set to values that pass today: ruff `D` with per-file-ignores per unconverted module, `interrogate` at `fail-under = 52` against a measured 52.1%, and Makefile targets wired into the quality workflow. The doctest allowlist ships empty and the `doctest` target handles that, because the files carrying runnable examples arrive with the docstring PR. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Generating the documentation
To generate the documentation, you first have to build it. Several packages are necessary to build the doc, you can install them with the following command, at the root of the code repository:
pip install -e . -r docs-requirements.txt
You will also need nodejs. Please refer to their installation page
NOTE
You only need to generate the documentation to inspect it locally (if you're planning changes and want to
check how they look before committing for instance). You don't have to git commit the built documentation.
Building the documentation
Once you have setup the doc-builder and additional packages, you can generate the documentation by
typing the following command:
doc-builder build lerobot docs/source/ --build_dir ~/tmp/test-build
You can adapt the --build_dir to set any temporary folder that you prefer. This command will create it and generate
the MDX files that will be rendered as the documentation on the main website. You can inspect them in your favorite
Markdown editor.
Previewing the documentation
To preview the docs, first install the watchdog module with:
pip install watchdog
Then run the following command:
doc-builder preview lerobot docs/source/
The docs will be viewable at http://localhost:3000. You can also preview the docs once you have opened a PR. You will see a bot add a comment to a link where the documentation with your changes lives.
NOTE
The preview command only works with existing doc files. When you add a completely new file, you need to update _toctree.yml & restart preview command (ctrl-c to stop it & call doc-builder preview ... again).
Adding a new element to the navigation bar
Accepted files are Markdown (.md).
Create a file with its extension and put it in the source directory. You can then link it to the toc-tree by putting
the filename without the extension in the _toctree.yml file.
Renaming section headers and moving sections
It helps to keep the old links working when renaming the section header and/or moving sections from one document to another. This is because the old links are likely to be used in Issues, Forums, and Social media and it'd make for a much more superior user experience if users reading those months later could still easily navigate to the originally intended information.
Therefore, we simply keep a little map of moved sections at the end of the document where the original section was. The key is to preserve the original anchor.
So if you renamed a section from: "Section A" to "Section B", then you can add at the end of the file:
Sections that were moved:
[ <a href="#section-b">Section A</a><a id="section-a"></a> ]
and of course, if you moved it to another file, then:
Sections that were moved:
[ <a href="../new-file#section-b">Section A</a><a id="section-a"></a> ]
Use the relative style to link to the new file so that the versioned docs continue to work.
For an example of a rich moved sections set please see the very end of the transformers Trainer doc.
Adding a new tutorial
Adding a new tutorial or section is done in two steps:
- Add a new file under
./source. This file can either be ReStructuredText (.rst) or Markdown (.md). - Link that file in
./source/_toctree.ymlon the correct toc-tree.
Make sure to put your new file under the proper section. If you have a doubt, feel free to ask in a Github Issue or PR.
Writing source documentation
Values that should be put in code should either be surrounded by backticks: `like so`. Note that argument names
and objects like True, None or any strings should usually be put in code.
Writing a multi-line code block
Multi-line code blocks can be useful for displaying examples. They are done between two lines of three backticks as usual in Markdown:
```
# first line of code
# second line
# etc
```
Adding an image
Due to the rapidly growing repository, it is important to make sure that no files that would significantly weigh down the repository are added. This includes images, videos, and other non-text files. We prefer to leverage a hf.co hosted dataset like
the ones hosted on hf-internal-testing in which to place these files and reference
them by URL. We recommend putting them in the following dataset: huggingface/documentation-images.
If an external contribution, feel free to add the images to your PR and ask a Hugging Face member to migrate your images
to this dataset.