Share your code with other people

Sharing your code with other people need not be limited to people you know. It is very easy to share your code online so that anyone, anywhere can use it.

This probably sounds scary – after all, this is your first object-oriented program. However, you might be surprised and pleased by other people’s reaction to your code – you might get offers of help, or you might make someone’s day by saving them a lot of time!

You can use a website such as GitHub to share your code so that other people can use it, and maybe even suggest changes. Follow this guide for beginners to get your code online. All the code you have downloaded in this course is on GitHub for anyone to see and use.

If you are sharing your code, it is also useful to provide some documentation so that people know what classes and methods are available, and how to use them. Python has a built-in feature for automatically creating basic documentation. Once again, you will only be able to use this feature if you are using Python installed on your computer rather than using Trinket.

You will need to add docstrings to your code, which will form the basis of the documentation. This is very easy – simply add a line of explanation at the start of each function and enclose it in triple quotation marks, like this:

def get_description(self):
 """Returns a string containing the description of the room"""
 return self.description

Next, open a terminal window (search ‘cmd’ on Windows) and navigate to your rpg folder using the cd command, for example:

cd PathToMyCode
cd rpg

Type in the following command to generate documentation for all files in this folder:

On Windows

python -m pydoc -w . 

On Mac/Linux

python3 -m pydoc -w ./ 

If you get an error when you try this command, take a look at this resource, and make sure you have added Python to your path.

This command should generate HTML files in your directory with the same names as your class files. Open the files to see the documentation for your package.