Documentation in Python

Sphinx is the long-standing standard for Python documentation, used by CPython itself. It reads reStructuredText (and Markdown through the MyST extension), pulls API reference from docstrings with autodoc, resolves cross-references between projects and outputs HTML, PDF and other formats. It suits large projects with extensive API reference. Material for MkDocs is Markdown-first, with a polished theme and built-in search, and is popular for product and guide-style docs; API reference comes from plugins such as mkdocstrings.

pdoc generates API documentation straight from your modules, docstrings and type hints with almost no configuration, which is ideal for small libraries. Zensical is a newer static site generator for technical documentation from the team behind Material for MkDocs. Diagrams lets you draw cloud and system architecture diagrams as Python code, so they can be versioned and reviewed next to the docs.