All the commands in here are assumed to be run from within the docs directory.

In a virtual environment, make sure that you install the development dependencies:

pip install -e "..[dev]"

Or if your package manager of choice is uv, you can run:

(cd .. && make install-dev)

Maintainers will additionally require an installation including detectron2 for the release, however it is not necessary for contributors. This isn't handled in requirements because the version you'll need depends on your GPU/hardware. For installing detectron2, follow the instructions.

The sphinx documentation generator provides a Makefile. To build the html documentation without running python files (tutorials) use:

make html-noplot

This is the recommended way to locally build the docs before creating a PR and will put the build .html files inside docs/build. Since above command uses caching to speed up the build, some warnings may not appear after the initial build. It is therefore advisable to do a clean build from time to time by running:

make clean-html-noplot

The built docs can be viewed by calling:

make serve-local

For building the full docs with python files (including tutorials), run (usually not necessary during development):

make html

Only Lightly core team members will have access to deploy new docs.

1. Open a terminal and go to the docs/ folder.
2. If not done yet, authenticate your account using gcloud auth login
3. Deploy to app engine using gcloud app deploy app.yaml