I have a project (https://github.com/jfkominsky/PyHab) which is essentially an extension of PsychoPy (http://psychopy.org/). I want to use Sphinx and ReadTheDocs for code documentation. I use the autoclass features from Sphinx for my documentation and have most of it in the code itself, which works great on local builds. On ReadTheDocs, this means that I needed to add a requirements file with psychopy as a requirement. This causes the build to fail in the following way:
/home/docs/checkouts/readthedocs.org/user_builds/pyhab/envs/latest/bin/pip install --exists-action=w --cache-dir /home/docs/checkouts/readthedocs.org/user_builds/pyhab/.cache/pip -rdocs/requirements.txt
Command killed due to excessive memory consumption
I'm very amateur at this. Is there a way to use a setup.py virtual environment to get psychopy to work? Is readthedocs just being too stingy with memory? I've noticed psychopy itself has some issues with RTD builds right now, unsure if that's related...
EDIT: I should add, I was using Cpython2 as my environment in RTD. When I use CPython3 instead I get a different failure:
I tried again with Py3 and got a different error:
ERROR: failed building wxWidgets Traceback (most recent call last): File "build.py", line 1321, in cmd_build_wx wxbuild.main(wxDir(), build_options) File "/tmp/pip-build-7a1lqn7v/wxPython/buildtools/build_wxwidgets.py", line 374, in main "Error running configure") File "/tmp/pip-build-7a1lqn7v/wxPython/buildtools/build_wxwidgets.py", line 85, in exitIfError raise builder.BuildError(msg) buildtools.builder.BuildError: Error running configure Finished command: build_wx (0m10.842s) Finished command: build (0m10.842s) Command '"/home/docs/checkouts/readthedocs.org/user_builds/pyhab/envs/latest/bin/python" -u build.py build' failed with exit code 1.
I have devised a solution, at least for CPython2.x. The long and short of it, which RTD needs to advertise MUCH better, is that you can slip a bunch of 'mocks' into conf.py in order to bypass modules you don't want to actually import when compiling your docs. You need mock in your requirements file in 2.7 (presumably unittest.mock in 3.x)
The idea came from here: http://blog.rtwilson.com/how-to-make-your-sphinx-documentation-compile-with-readthedocs-when-youre-using-numpy-and-scipy/
Which connects back to this in the FAQ: http://read-the-docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/faq.html#i-get-import-errors-on-libraries-that-depend-on-c-modules
I realized that you could create mock modules for literally anything, and if you use MagicMock you can add attributes to them as needed. It took me several tries to get all the right mock modules (mostly because the RTD environment is hard to emulate locally and it would only show you the first module it failed to import in the error message), but eventually, I was able to convince RTD that it had everything it needed without exceeding its memory limits.
This solution is not psychopy-specific. This will work for anything that you have trouble pip installing on RTD.