Error of `make html` to build API reference

I was following the guide to build the API reference. Took me a while to debug the make html to build api reference in apidoc folder on macOS. Error message:

sed -i 's/:class:`plotly.graph_objects/:class:`plotly.graph_objs/g' ../../packages/python/plotly/plotly/graph_objs/*.py
sed: 1: "../../packages/python/p ...": invalid command code .
make: *** [html] Error 1

The problem was that the sed commands in the apidoc/Makefile don't work on macOS. You'll need to edit the Makefile to replace commands like

sed -i 's/:class:`plotly.graph_objects/:class:`plotly.graph_objs/g' ../../packages/python/plotly/plotly/graph_objs/*.py

with

sed -i '' -e 's/:class:`plotly.graph_objects/:class:`plotly.graph_objs/g' ../../packages/python/plotly/plotly/graph_objs/*.py

Why?

On the OSX version of sed, the -i option expects an extension argument so your command is actually parsed as the extension argument and the file path is interpreted as the command code.

See this thread for details.

Start in apidoc/Makefile and inspect the sed commands used by the html target. Run make html on macOS to reproduce the failure, then verify that the API reference builds successfully with the macOS-compatible commands.