# How OVN’s Documentation Works

This document provides a brief overview on how the documentation build system within OVN works. This is intended to maximize the “bus factor” and share best practices with other projects.

## reStructuredText and Sphinx

Nearly all of OVN’s documentation is written in reStructuredText, with man pages being the sole exception. Of this documentation, most of it is fed into Sphinx, which provides not only the ability to convert rST to a variety of other output formats but also allows for things like cross-referencing and indexing. for more information on the two, refer to the OVN Documentation Style.

## sphinx_rtd_theme

The documentation uses sphinx_rtd_theme, which can be found on GitHub and is published on pypi. It is also packaged in major distributions. If building locally and the package is installed, it will be used. If the package is not installed, Sphinx will fallback to the default theme.

## Read the Docs

The documentation is hosted on readthedocs.org and a CNAME redirect is in place to allow access from docs.ovn.org. Read the Docs provides a couple of nifty features for us, such as automatic building of docs whenever there are changes and versioning of documentation.

The Read the Docs project is currently maintained by Stephen Finucane, Russell Bryant and Ben Pfaff.

## ovn.org

The sources for ovn.org are maintained separately from docs.ovn.org. For modifications to this site, refer to the GitHub project.