You must have Python and Sphinx installed.

For django versions 1.0.x and 1.1.x, you must to install sphinx from source.

hg clone http://bitbucket.org/birkenfeld/sphinx/
cd sphinx
hg up -q -r 1689
python setup.py install

If you don't have mercurial installed, use one of the links below:

For later django versions, use sphinx 1.0 or later:

easy_install sphinx

Create the following directories in the django source tree:

docs/_build/doctrees
docs/_build/htmlhelp

Delete script tags from the html template (django version 1.1 or higher).

For django versions 1.2 and higher, this lives at docs/_theme/djangodocs/layout.html. In earlier versions, it's location is docs/_templates/layout.html.

Look for the following section and delete it:

{% block extrahead %}
{{ super() }}
<script type="text/javascript" src="{{ pathto('templatebuiltins.js', 1)
    }}"></script>
 ...
})(jQuery);
</script>
{% endblock %}

Open a command prompt, cd into the docs directory and run sphinx:

sphinx-build -b htmlhelp -d _build/doctrees . _build/htmlhelp

This generates the html which will be compiled into the chm file.

By default the Last updated field which appears on every page will be set to the current date at the time the docs are built. Add an extra parameter -A last_updated="May 14, 2010" to set this to an earlier date. (You can find the date of last update easily by browsing the django source code.)