Great Docs

An easy-to-use documentation site generator for Python packages

AI / Agents

Skills
llms.txt
llms-full.txt

Developers

Rich Iannone

Maintainer

Posit, PBC

Tomasz Kalinowski

Contributor

Posit, PBC

Posit Software, PBC

Copyright holder, funder

Community

Contributing guide
Code of conduct
Full license
Citing great-docs

Meta

Requires: Python >=3.11
Provides-Extra: dev, docs

A documentation site generator for Python packages. Run great-docs init in your project directory and get a complete documentation site with auto-generated API reference, CLI docs, and modern styling.

Install

pip install great-docs

Quick Start

cd your-python-package

great-docs init      # detect your package and generate config
great-docs build     # generate and render the site
great-docs preview   # view at localhost:3000

What It Does

Great Docs inspects your Python package to generate a full documentation site:

  • API Reference — classes, functions, methods, and attributes organized into structured pages with parameter tables, return types, examples, and source links
  • CLI Reference — Click-based CLIs documented automatically with terminal-style help output
  • Landing Page — your README transformed into a homepage with a metadata sidebar
  • User Guide — narrative documentation from your user_guide/ directory
  • Custom Sections — recipes, blog posts, tutorials, or any other content you add

Everything is rendered by Quarto into a static site you can host anywhere.

Site Features

  • Dark mode toggle with persistent preference
  • Gradient navbar themes (8 presets)
  • GitHub widget with live star and fork counts
  • Sidebar search filter for large APIs
  • Source links to GitHub for every documented item
  • Responsive layout for mobile and desktop
  • Announcement banners (dismissible, styled)
  • llms.txt and llms-full.txt for AI documentation indexing
  • Agent Skills generation (agentskills.io compliant)

Configuration

All options live in great-docs.yml. The init command generates this for you. See the Configuration Guide for the full reference.

Deploy to GitHub Pages

great-docs setup-github-pages

Creates a GitHub Actions workflow that builds and publishes your site on every push to main.

Learn More

  • User Guide — setup, configuration, theming, and deployment
  • Recipes — step-by-step guides for common tasks
  • API Reference — Great Docs’ own API documentation

License

MIT. See LICENSE for the full text.