Day 0 docs: A Sphinx starter kit for documentation for FOSS projects

Every open source project needs great documentation, but setting up a Sphinx based documentation that looks professional and is easy to maintain can be surprisingly painful. You often end up stitching together themes, extensions, and configuration.

The Sphinx stack for docs is an open source starter kit that helps with this kind of bootstrapping for documentation. It bundles a polished Sphinx theme, a curated set of extensions, defaults, and a recommended project structure.

It is freely available for anyone to use or adapt and is used across many of Canonical’s open source projects including Ubuntu, LXD, Juju and more. This talk aims to introduce the project to the audience, explore how it can be used to structure a new documentation. Irrespective of the project you are building, this talk hopes to provide you a concrete starting point for building the documentation for your project.

Who is this talk for?

• Developers who maintain or want to start a docs site for an open source project

• Technical writers looking for a Sphinx-based workflow for their documentation

• Contributors to projects that already use Sphinx documentation who want to understand its mechanics.

• A working idea of how the sphinx stack for documentation can be their starter kit.

• A project that they can clone and adapt for their own project immediately.

• A lower barrier of entry into FOSS world through documentation.

• Real world examples in the FOSS space that they can use as inspirations for quality documentation.