This is the source for the OpenROAD-flow-scripts (ORFS) documentation, published at https://openroad-flow-scripts.readthedocs.io/en/latest/.

The documentation for the OpenROAD application itself lives in a different repository and is published at https://openroad.readthedocs.io/en/latest/.

• Python 3.10 — the version Read the Docs builds with (see .readthedocs.yaml). The pinned Sphinx release does not run on Python 3.13 or newer.
• pip
• virtualenv (or the standard-library venv)

Run from the repository root:

virtualenv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r docs/requirements_lock.txt

docs/requirements_lock.txt is the hash-pinned lock file that Read the Docs installs, so a local build matches the published one. The direct dependencies are listed in docs/requirements.in; after editing that file, regenerate the lock with:

pip-compile --generate-hashes --output-file=docs/requirements_lock.txt docs/requirements.in

cd docs
make html

The generated site is in docs/build/html; open docs/build/html/index.html.

cd docs
make checklinks

The report is written to docs/build/output.txt (and docs/build/output.json). It exits non-zero when any link is unreachable.

• The build needs network access: docs/conf.py downloads three files from the OpenROAD repository at build time.
• Building writes generated pages into the source tree: index2.md, SupportedOS.md, Manpage.md, mainREADME.md, and — because it is fetched rather than authored here — the tracked file contrib/GitGuide.md. Do not commit those changes; git checkout docs/contrib/GitGuide.md after a build.
• Always rm -rf docs/build before rebuilding. The output directory is build/, but conf.py's exclude_patterns only excludes _build, so a second run picks up the Markdown files written under build/html/ as if they were source pages.