FiftyOne Documentation

February 19, 2026 ยท View on GitHub

The official FiftyOne documentation, available at fiftyone.ai.

FiftyOne uses Sphinx and Sphinx-Napoleon to generate its documentation and API reference from source.

Prerequisites

Before building the docs locally, ensure you have:

  • Python 3.11 installed and a virtual environment created specifically for documentation.

    Note: Do NOT use the same environment where you ran install.sh with the -d (dev mode) flag, as docs dependencies may conflict with test dependencies.

  • pandoc installed.

  • A Unix-like shell environment to execute bash commands.

Setup

To build the documentation locally, follow these steps:

  1. Install FiftyOne:

    cd ..
bash install.sh

  2. Install documentation-specific requirements:

    pip install -r requirements/docs.txt

  3. To use the fiftyone repository to autogenerate docs, you need to add it to your PYTHONPATH:

    export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/path/to/fiftyone

Tip: to avoid running this every time you build the docs, add the previous line to your ~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, or the appropriate shell profile for your environment.

Building

You can build the docs from source by running the generate_docs.bash script in this folder:

bash docs/generate_docs.bash

A couple notable flags are supported:

  • -c performs a clean build by removing the docs/build folder beforehand. This is sometimes necessary to force updates, e.g. if you have edited a template and want to see how it affects pages whose source files haven't changed
  • -s will update static files only, i.e. custom.css and custom.js mentioned below
  • -f will perform a fast build, i.e. zoo and plugin docs will be skipped

Previewing a single page

To preview a single page with full styling without running a full build:

bash docs/preview_page.bash user_guide/using_datasets.rst

This supports RST and Jupyter notebook files and opens the result in your browser. No prior build is required.

Contributing

Main Content

The main content is located in the docs/source folder. The files are written in Sphinx RST format.

The API documentation is automatically generated from the Python source code, whose docstrings are written in Sphinx-Napoleon format.

Check out the existing patterns in the source files and you'll catch on.

FiftyOne Brain

For Voxel51 developers who are working with a source install of the FiftyOne Brain: the build script will automatically use your source install!

Teams SDK

Voxel51 developers can include Teams SDK-related components in their local docs build by including the -t flag:

bash docs/generate_docs.bash -t /path/to/fiftyone-teams

Style Guide

All documentation, including RST and all code samples embedded in it, must follow our style guide.

Note that pre-commit hooks will automatically enforce the whitespace-related components of our style when you commit changes.

Themes

This extends the theme pydata_sphinx_theme. However, you should prefer to make changes in the following locations instead of the theme itself whenever possible:

  • docs/source/_static contains custom.css and custom.js files, where any CSS overrides or custom JS should be added
  • docs/source/_templates contains HTML files (Jinja2 templates) that override theme templates of the same name. These should extend the theme templates - see the existing templates for how to do this. If you need to override part of the theme template that isn't conveniently marked as a block (and isn't a separate file that you can override), our convention is to add a block prefixed with custom_ to the theme template, then override that block locally

Compile CSS

To compile Sass styles into CSS for the documentation:

make css

This command compiles the Sass files located in docs/source/assets/styles/ and outputs the compiled CSS to docs/source/_static/custom.css.