Simon Willison’s Weblog

Pydoc

23rd March 2004

Pydoc is awesome; I don’t know how I missed it for so long. Simply type the following at the command line:

pydoc -p 8888

Then point a browser at http://localhost:8888/ to browse interactive documentation for every Python module available on your system. This includes moduldes installed in your site-packages directory. If you keep code you’ve written yourself in site-packages you’ll be able to browse the documentation for that too. If you’re even remotely consistent about writing docstrings you’ll be amazed at how useful the resulting documentation is. I can’t believe I only just discovered this!