Where can I download the Django documentation?

Question

Django's website seems good but for some reason I couldn't find where to download the documentation:

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.1/

(Yes, I need the docs for 1.1)

Does anyone know?

Solution 1

Django's documentation is built using Sphinx and included in their source tree.

From a checked-out copy of Django's source, just run make in the docs directory. You can find instructions for getting the source here: http://www.djangoproject.com/download/

Solution 2

Offline Documentation for Django 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 in various formats:

http://readthedocs.org/projects/django/downloads/

Solution 3

You can download offline documentation for Django 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 in both PDF and HTML from http://sramana.github.com/dod/.

Solution 4

In the bottom of right sidebar there are links to zipped HTML version, PDF version and ePub version.

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/stable/

Solution 5

"Okay, I just did it manually using sphinx-build. It was a pretty bad experience."

Hmm. I just tried and it was a pretty smooth experience (and I have never done this before). Here's the Linux recipe:

1. "cd" to the directory where your Django 1.2.x download has been extracted (in my case "~/downloads/Django-1.2.1")
2. cd docs
3. make latex PAPER=a4
4. cd _build/latex
5. make all-pdf

And the end result is 1000 page tome of Django goodness!

View more solutions

Comments

[fmalina]

readthedocs.org/projects/django/downloads

[maciek]

docs.djangoproject.com/en/stable in the right sidebar, bottom

[Michael Greene]

The Makefile is only there for convenience. If you have Sphinx installed, you can just invoke the sphinx-build executable directly where you would make. sphinx-build help will list the arguments, and you can look at the Makefile to see what Django would use: code.djangoproject.com/browser/django/trunk/docs/Makefile

[Michael Greene]

Also, you could always use Cygwin, but I assume that's not what you want to do ;)

[Ram Rachum]

Okay, I just did it manually using sphinx-build. It was a pretty bad experience. (I had to figure out how the makefile works, and there appears to have been a small error there that I managed to fix.) I just want to say that I don't think it's very Pythonic that you have to go through all this just to have an offline copy of the documentation. I hope that someone will make a better solution.

[Michael Greene]

Sphinx does have the ability to export PDFs, etc. I don't know if it's ever been proposed that the Django website host these artifacts, but if that's a need of yours maybe you should.

[Ram Rachum]

A "pretty smooth experience" would be to click a "download documentation" link on Django's website.

[gamesbook]

Agreed. Why not post this as a request to the mailing list or on the tracking system?

[toast38coza]

If you google: "django 1.2 documentation filetype:pdf" (that's how I found this thread :)) you're pretty likely to find something out there on the internet (though I found i did need to look around a little). here's 1.2: pub.xupisco.net/django_docs-1.2.pdf

[Gnudiff]

Note that for django 1.3 default "make html" fails on Windows as the Makefile appears to not specify the sourcedir for docs; you can use "sphinx-build . _build" to make the default documentation.

[alanjds]

There is a direct link on the docs.djangoproject.com sidebar the last time I looked at it! (and a kindly mark of "provided by Read The Docs")

[mike rodent]

Cygwin default install doesn't currently include "make"... yes you can add it, but if it involves installing the whole of the C language this will seriously bloat your Cygwin files (e.g. by 1+ GB)... seems a bit mad just to create documentation. This said, it's a shame: I always like to generate my offline docs from the source if possible. On Windoze I'd recommend maciek's solution.

[run_the_race]

I just could not find it on django's site, thanks so much! The readthedocs version I found online was one giant 16MB html file that took ages to load, this version is perfect!

[run_the_race]

See @maciek's answer for easily just downloading it.

[run_the_race]

This version is horrible, a 16MB html file that takes ages to load. @maciek answer downloads a much better (original) (not computer parsed and regenerated version).

[run_the_race]

The link is 404