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
Project roadmap
Security policy
Full license MIT
Citing great-docs

Meta

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

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.