Format code examples in documentation with blacken-docs#

Setting a different line length#

I read most documentation on my phone, so when I’m writing code examples I tend to try to keep the line lengths a little bit shorter to avoid having to scroll sideways when reading.

blacken-docs has a -l option for changing the length (Black defaults to 88 characters) which can be used like this:

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blacken-docs -l 60 docs/*.rst

Missing function bodies with …#

I was getting errors with some of my code examples that looked like this:

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@pytest.fixture
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def datasette(tmp_path_factory):
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    # This fixture will be executed repeatedly for every test

This is because of the missing function body. It turns out adding ... (which looks prettier than pass) fixes this issue:

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@pytest.fixture
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def datasette(tmp_path_factory):
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    # This fixture will be executed repeatedly for every test
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    ...

Running this in CI#

The blacken-docs command outputs errors if it finds any Python examples it cannot parse. I actually found a couple of bugs in my examples using this, so it’s a handy feature.

This also causes the tool to exit with a status code of 1:

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% blacken-docs -l 60 docs/*.rst
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docs/authentication.rst: Rewriting...
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docs/internals.rst:196: code block parse error Cannot parse: 14:0: <line number missing in source>
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docs/json_api.rst:449: code block parse error Cannot parse: 1:0: <link rel="alternate"
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docs/plugin_hooks.rst:250: code block parse error Cannot parse: 6:4:     ]
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docs/plugin_hooks.rst:311: code block parse error Cannot parse: 38:0: <line number missing in source>
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% echo $?
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1

I also wanted my CI to fail if the author had forgotten to run blacken-docs against the repository before pushing the commit.

I filed a feature request asking for an equivalent of the black . --check option, but it turns out that feature isn’t necessary - blacken-docs returns a non-zero exit code if it makes any changes. So just running the following in CI works for checking if it should have been applied:

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    - name: Check if blacken-docs needs to be run
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      run: |
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        blacken-docs -l 60 docs/*.rst