Developer documentation workflow

What you need to know

For developer documentation, we use Doxygen comments extensively throughout NEST.

After installing NEST, you can extract comments from the source code with make doc. A doxygen folder with HTML files will be generated in the doc folder in your source directory.

Note

This workflow shows you how to create developer documentation for NEST. For user documentation, please refer to our User documentation workflow.

Instructions

Make sure you have already installed NEST and created your build and install directories. Your CMake version needs to be up-to-date.

  1. Install Doxygen.

If you are a Linux user, type:

sudo apt install doxygen

For macOS, please use Homebrew:

brew install doxygen

  1. Go to your build directory:

cd </path/to/nest-build>

  1. Generate HTML:

make doc

  1. Preview documentation:

cd doc/doxygen/html
browser index.html

Helpdesk

For a list of commands for SLI and C++, you can access the the online command index via the command line

import nest
nest.helpdesk()

Note

The helpdesk() command needs to know which browser to launch in order to display the help pages. The browser is set as an option of helpdesk. Please see the file ~/.nestrc for an example, which sets Firefox as browser.

Note

The helpdesk() command does not work if you have compiled NEST with MPI support, but you have to enter the address of the helpdesk (file://<nest_install_dir>/share/doc/nest/index.html) manually into the browser. Replace <nest_install_dir> with the path under which NEST is installed.