viewsource links to contrib.auth.forms not appearing

[Yemar Nevets]

Dev URL borken: ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/_modules/django/contrib/auth/forms/

This "1.8" URL works: ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.8/_modules/django/contrib/auth/forms/

But navigating to the Dev version breaks with 404

[Tim Graham]

It looks like the issue started in Django 1.9. I wonder if the imports changes in fe914341c83b37fd6aa8fd85620cf49dd2328ab0 may be at fault. I haven't looked into how sphinx.ext.viewcode works.

[Hasan Ramezani]

It is not only contrib.auth.forms. here are the missing source code files list.

django/db/models/fields/related_descriptors.html
django/contrib/contenttypes/fields.html
django/contrib/contenttypes/admin.html
django/contrib/contenttypes/forms.html
django/contrib/contenttypes/models.html
django/contrib/admin/models.html
django/contrib/admin/apps.html
django/contrib/sessions/base_session.html
django/contrib/auth/validators.html
django/contrib/auth/views.html
django/contrib/auth/mixins.html
django/contrib/auth/middleware.html
django/contrib/auth/backends.html
django/contrib/auth/forms.html
django/contrib/auth/models.html
django/contrib/auth/base_user.html

from ​Sphinx viewcode extensions: Basically, viewcode extension will import the modules being linked to.

when Sphinx tries to do for example import django.contrib.auth.forms, it will get

django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: Requested setting INSTALLED_APPS, but settings are not configured. You must either define the environment variable DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE or call settings.configure() before accessing settings.

So, I created a ​PR to load the apps in ​https://github.com/django/django/blob/master/docs/conf.py. But the docs test failed. But in my local machine, it works and missed source files generated successfully.

I don't know this is a good solution or not. just a PR to start the discussion.

[Felix Hein]

I spent some time trying to understand this issue and the longer I think about it, the less clear it becomes to me which parts of the source code should be linked to and which shouldn't.
The list of linked modules at ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/_modules/ is missing a lot of modules, which could well be intentional. (That list is the list of files generated by the viewcode extension, so it contains all the source code files that are linked to somewhere in the documentation, like here: ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/applications/#django.apps.AppConfig.)

The modules mentioned in this ticket have not been linked to for a long time (and thus their source code has not been included in the /_modules/.. section of the documentation for that same time). So is this maybe something that we do not actually want to link to?

[Sarah Boyce]

​https://github.com/django/django/pull/16825

[Sarah Boyce]

Updating the status to "Accepted" as edits have been pushed recently and need a review :)

[David Smith]

​New PR

[David Smith]

​PR

[Natalia Bidart]

Setting as patch needs improvements following review from yesterday.

[Natalia Bidart]

Branch is pretty much ready for merge though there is a tiny pending detail about better error reporting when calling importlib.util.resolve_name(name=imported_path, package=module). Setting the needs improvement flag to track that item.

[nessita <124304+nessita@…>]

In b691acce:

Fixed #29942 -- Restored source file linking in docs by using the Sphinx linkcode ext.

Co-authored-by: David Smith <smithdc@…>
Co-authored-by: Natalia <124304+nessita@…>

[Zach Borboa]

hi. this ticket is marked fixed, but the dev URL mentioned in the description[1] still 404s.

[1] ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/_modules/django/contrib/auth/forms/

[Tim Graham]

Probably the documentation hasn't been updated since this change due to a ​Python 3.8 incompatibility.

[GitHub <noreply@…>]

In 15fff62d:

Refs #29942 -- Fixed docs build on Python < 3.9 avoiding dict union operator.

The docs build process was failing on djangoproject.com since it uses Python 3.8 and the dict union operator was added in Python 3.9.

[Natalia Bidart]

Replying to Zach Borboa:

hi. this ticket is marked fixed, but the dev URL mentioned in the description[1] still 404s.

[1] ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/_modules/django/contrib/auth/forms/

Hello Zach,

As Tim mentioned, we did land a fix but it wasn't available because of a docs build issue in our building server. We have now fixed that and the linking to source code is available via the "[source]" link in the docs, for example in ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/auth/default/#django.contrib.auth.forms.PasswordChangeForm there is a link to ​https://github.com/django/django/blob/main/django/contrib/auth/forms.py#L488

The fix for this issue included migrating from one Sphinx extension (viewcode) to another (linkcode), so now the docs include links to the source code directly in GitHub.

[Natalia Bidart]

Docs build failure fixed in 15fff62d5d8f28b6b61d63341535c9aafc64c865 and confirmed docs now build correctly in both RTD and our server.