Generate maintainable tutorials quickly

(A hackday project from the Software Sustainability Institute Collaborations Workshop 2019.)

Tutorials and how-to guides are a key component of software documentation. While many tools exist for automatic generation of API reference material, tutorials can be intimidating to set up and easily fall behind software changes. WYRIWYD is intended to help novice software developers build and maintain tutorials for simple command-line programs.

The main components of WYRIWYD are:

• A wizard which creates a bare-bones tutorial by watching the developer use their own code in a shell.

• A markdown file convention which allows users to comfortably insert further comments and make corrections/updates as the code changes.

• A testing utility which verifies that the tutorial is correct for the current code version. If continuous integration (e.g. Travis CI) is used, this test can be added to the repository hooks for futher peace of mind.

pip install git+https://github.com/wyriwyd/wyriwyd.git#egg=wyriwyd

To generate markdown documentation, run the wyriwydzard command. After entering the name of the document to generate, keep entering your commands in the prompt. A bare-bones tutorial will be generated in markdown, which you can expand with explanations of the commands.

To test existing markdown documentation, just run the wyriwyd-test command over the markdown file. Note if the commands in the documentation assume you will be in a given directory, then you should cd there first.

cd examples/
wyriwyd-test sample.md

And if everything is ok, you should see:

Everything looks ok!!

For more support on the testing tool, use --help

wyriwyd-test --help

usage: wyriwyd-test [-h] [-r] [-e EMPTY] infile

positional arguments:
  infile                The path to the input markdown file

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -r, --raise-error     Raise an exception at the first error
  -e EMPTY, --empty EMPTY
                        If the Markdown file contains commands without a
                        following output, and the command when runs produces
                        output, treat this as an error

We even run the command itself over this README:

• https://github.com/wyriwyd/wyriwyd/blob/master/.travis.yml

There's also an example project at https://github.com/wyriwyd/wyriwyd-live-demo