# Building the documentation

The MDTraj documentation is built using sphinx and requires a few dependencies like ipython and matplotlib that you probably already have installed. We use travis-ci for continuous integration (running the tests), and also for building the documentation, which is built and pushed directly to Amazon S3 after every successful build.

Although readthedocs is a great tool, it doesn’t have the flexibility we need for this project. We use sphinx’s autodoc feature to generate documentation from docstrings, many of which are in compiled cython code. This means that building the documentation requires having a fully compiled version of MDTraj, which is not supported on readthedoc’s servers. Furthermore, our documentation includes examples (with plots!) which are built directly with the documentation, and requires a fully functional MDTraj environment.

If you’d like to build the docs on your machine, you’ll first need to install sphinx and numpydoc

    pip install sphinx numpydoc

You’ll also need IPython, pandoc and runipy for the example notebooks

    sudo apt-get install pandoc
    pip install ipython runipy

Now, go back to the docs subdirectory in the main repository. The documentation will be built in the `docs/_build` subdirectory

    cd docs
    make html