autodoc provides several directives that are versions of the usual py:module , py:class and so forth. On parsing time, they import the corresponding module and extract the docstring of the given objects, inserting them into the page source under a suitable py:module , py:class etc. directive.
Here are three alternatives:
To ensure that __init__()
is always documented, you can use autodoc-skip-member
in conf.py. Like this:
def skip(app, what, name, obj, would_skip, options):
if name == "__init__":
return False
return would_skip
def setup(app):
app.connect("autodoc-skip-member", skip)
This explicitly defines __init__
not to be skipped (which it is by default). This configuration is specified once, and it does not require any additional markup for every class in the .rst source.
The special-members
option was added in Sphinx 1.1. It makes "special" members (those with names like __special__
) be documented by autodoc.
Since Sphinx 1.2, this option takes arguments which makes it more useful than it was previously.
Use automethod
:
.. autoclass:: MyClass
:members:
.. automethod:: __init__
This has to be added for every class (cannot be used with automodule
, as pointed out in a comment to the first revision of this answer).
You were close. You can use the autoclass_content
option in your conf.py
file:
autoclass_content = 'both'
Over the past years I've written several variants of autodoc-skip-member
callbacks for various unrelated Python projects because I wanted methods like __init__()
, __enter__()
and __exit__()
to show up in my API documentation (after all, these "special methods" are part of the API and what better place to document them than inside the special method's docstring).
Recently I took the best implementation and made it part of one of my Python projects (here's the documentation). The implementation basically comes down to this:
import types
def setup(app):
"""Enable Sphinx customizations."""
enable_special_methods(app)
def enable_special_methods(app):
"""
Enable documenting "special methods" using the autodoc_ extension.
:param app: The Sphinx application object.
This function connects the :func:`special_methods_callback()` function to
``autodoc-skip-member`` events.
.. _autodoc: http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/stable/ext/autodoc.html
"""
app.connect('autodoc-skip-member', special_methods_callback)
def special_methods_callback(app, what, name, obj, skip, options):
"""
Enable documenting "special methods" using the autodoc_ extension.
Refer to :func:`enable_special_methods()` to enable the use of this
function (you probably don't want to call
:func:`special_methods_callback()` directly).
This function implements a callback for ``autodoc-skip-member`` events to
include documented "special methods" (method names with two leading and two
trailing underscores) in your documentation. The result is similar to the
use of the ``special-members`` flag with one big difference: Special
methods are included but other types of members are ignored. This means
that attributes like ``__weakref__`` will always be ignored (this was my
main annoyance with the ``special-members`` flag).
The parameters expected by this function are those defined for Sphinx event
callback functions (i.e. I'm not going to document them here :-).
"""
if getattr(obj, '__doc__', None) and isinstance(obj, (types.FunctionType, types.MethodType)):
return False
else:
return skip
Yes, there's more documentation than logic :-). The advantage of defining an autodoc-skip-member
callback like this over the use of the special-members
option (for me) is that the special-members
option also enables documentation of properties like __weakref__
(available on all new-style classes, AFAIK) which I consider noise and not useful at all. The callback approach avoids this (because it only works on functions/methods and ignores other attributes).
Even though this is an older post, for those who are looking it up as of now, there is also another solution introduced in version 1.8. According to the documentation, You can add the special-member
key in the autodoc_default_options to your conf.py
.
Example:
autodoc_default_options = {
'members': True,
'member-order': 'bysource',
'special-members': '__init__',
'undoc-members': True,
'exclude-members': '__weakref__'
}
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