How to build Mininet documentation
After installing the Mininet software-defined network simulator on a virtual machine, you may want to build the documentation. Documentation is available on the Mininet web site but, if you installed a beta version of a new development release or installed an old version, you may want to use the documentation specific for the version you are using.
Mininet documentation is built into the source code and can be generated using the doxypy program. This post details the simple steps required to install doxypy and other required software, and to build and view the documentation.
Install doxypy
Start the Mininet virtual machine and log into it via SSH. See my previous post about setting up the Mininet SDN Network Simulator virtual machine.
On the Mininet VM, run the following command to install doxypy, and supporting software packages:
$ sudo apt-get install doxypy doxygen doxygen-latex help2man
This could take a while because it downloads over one Gigabyte of data, such as fonts.
Build the documentation
On the Mininet VM, run the following command to build the documentation
$ cd ~/mininet
$ make doc
This builds a PDF version of the documentation named refman.pdf in the folder: ~/mininet/doc/latex/.