Python Enhancement Proposals

The PEPs in this repo are published automatically on the web at https://www.python.org/dev/peps/. To learn more about the purpose of PEPs and how to go about writing a PEP, please start reading at PEP 1 (pep-0001.txt in this repo). Note that PEP 0, the index PEP, is now automatically generated, and not committed to the repo.

Contributing to PEPs

See the Contributing Guidelines.

reStructuredText for PEPs

Original PEP source should be written in reStructuredText format, which is a constrained version of plaintext, and is described in PEP 12. Older PEPs were often written in a more mildly restricted plaintext format, as described in PEP 9. The pep2html.py processing and installation script knows how to produce the HTML for either PEP format.

For processing reStructuredText format PEPs, you need the docutils package, which is available from PyPI. If you have pip, pip install docutils should install it.

Generating the PEP Index

PEP 0 is automatically generated based on the metadata headers in other PEPs. The script handling this is genpepindex.py, with supporting libraries in the pep0 directory.

Checking PEP formatting and rendering

Do not commit changes with bad formatting. To check the formatting of a PEP, use the Makefile. In particular, to generate HTML for PEP 9999, your source code should be in pep-9999.rst and the HTML will be generated to pep-9999.html by the command make pep-9999.html. The default Make target generates HTML for all PEPs.

If you don't have Make, use the pep2html.py script directly.

Generating HTML for python.org

python.org includes its own helper modules to render PEPs as HTML, with suitable links back to the source pages in the version control repository.

These can be found at https://github.com/python/pythondotorg/tree/main/peps

When making changes to the PEP management process that may impact python.org's rendering pipeline:

• Clone the python.org repository from https://github.com/python/pythondotorg/
• Get set up for local python.org development as per https://pythondotorg.readthedocs.io/install.html#manual-setup
• Adjust PEP_REPO_PATH in pydotorg/settings/local.py to refer to your local clone of the PEP repository
• Run ./manage.py generate_pep_pages as described in https://pythondotorg.readthedocs.io/pep_generation.html

Rendering PEPs with Sphinx

There is a Sphinx-rendered version of the PEPs at https://python.github.io/peps/ (updated on every push to main).

Warning: This version is not, and should not be taken to be, a canonical source for PEPs whilst it remains in preview (please report any rendering bugs). The canonical source for PEPs remains https://www.python.org/dev/peps/

Build PEPs with Sphinx locally:

1. Ensure you have Python >=3.9 and Sphinx installed
2. If you have access to make, follow (i), otherwise (ii)
   1. Run make sphinx-local
   2. Run python build.py -j 8 --build-files. Note that the jobs argument only takes effect on unix (non-mac) systems.
3. Wait for Sphinx to render the PEPs. There may be a series of warnings about unreferenced citations or labels -- whilst these are valid warnings they do not impact the build process.
4. Navigate to the build directory of your PEPs repo to find the HTML pages. PEP 0 provides a formatted index, and may be a useful reference.

Arguments to build.py:

Renderers:

-f or --build-files

Renders PEPs to pep-XXXX.html files

-d or --build-dirs

Renders PEPs to index.html files within pep-XXXX directories

Options:

-i or --index-file

Copies PEP 0 to a base index file

-j or --jobs

How many parallel jobs to run (if supported). Integer, default 1

-n or --nitpicky

Runs Sphinx in nitpicky mode

-w or --fail-on-warning

Fails Sphinx on warnings

Tools:

-l or --check-links

Checks validity of links within PEP sources