bpystubgen

BPY Stub Generator

A utility to generate Python API stubs from documentation files in reStructuredText format.

Introduction

The main usage of the program is to create Python API stubs from the documentation generated during the build process of Blender or UPBGE so that an IDE can provide autocompletion support and type hints for relevant modules like bpy or bge.

There are already a number of tools created with a similar goal in mind, notably fake-bpy-module which can be a good alternative to this project.

However, bpystubgen has a few advantages over the others:

• It's very fast - Some of those tools may take over an hour to generate the entire stubs for Blender. But bpystubgen can do it under a minute (1,593 source documents).
• The generated stub modules preserve most of the source documentation, so you can use them as a manual as well.
• It generates PEP-561 compliant stub modules, so it's safe to include them in your runtime module path.
• Along with its fast execution speed, the project also provides well-organised API and test suites to make it easier to fix bugs or improve the output quality.

Screenshots

Auto-completion at work in PyCharm:

Pop-up documentation support in VSCode:

Installation

The library can be installed using pip as follows:

$ pip install bpystubgen

Usage

Generating Stubs

If you want to generate the API stubs yourself, you can use bpystubgen module which can be invoked with the following options:

$ python -m bpystubgen -h

usage: bpystubgen [-h] [--verbose] [--quiet] input output

Generate Python API stubs from Blender documentation.

positional arguments:
  input       Source directory where *.rst files are located
  output      Output directory where generated modules will be saved

optional arguments:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit
  --verbose   Print debug messages
  --quiet     Print only error messages

Using Stubs

If you just want to use the API stubs, you can install them from PyPI without having to generate them yourself.

There are two variants of the API stubs, one for Blender and the other for UPBGE. For Blender, you can install blender-stubs module with an appropriate version qualifier as follows:

$ pip install blender-stubs==3.1.*

This will install the latest module for Blender 3.1, and for now stubs are provided for Blender 2.80 and onwards. You can also specify the next unreleased version as 3.2.* to get the latest snapshot of the module.

As for UPBGE, stubs are available for the 0.3 release, which you can install as follows:

$ pip install upbge-stubs==0.3.0.*

And for the latest snapshot version,

$ pip install upbge-stubs==0.3.1.*

You can also install it using Pipenv. Note that it is required to set allow_preleases option in case the target application has no stable release (i.e. UPBGE 0.3 branch). You can use the following content as a template for your Pipfile:

[[source]]
name = "pypi"
url = "https://pypi.org/simple"
verify_ssl = true

[packages]
"upbge-stubs" = "==0.3.1.*"

[requires]
python_version = "3.10"

[pipenv]
allow_prereleases = true

Also, it would be more correct to use [dev-packages] instead of [packages], in which case you can install or update the stubs using the -d flag like pipenv update -d.

License

This project is provided under the terms of GNU General Public License v3 (GPL3).