Building Documentation with Sphinx

Last updated on 2026-02-11 | Edit this page

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Overview

Questions

  • How can I make my documentation more accessible

Objectives

  • Build a documentation website with sphinx
  • Add overview documentation
  • Distribute a sphinx documentation site

Sphinx is a tool for building documentation. It is very popular for Python packages, because it was originally created for the Python documentation, but it currently supports a range of languages.

What does Sphinx produce?

Sphinx renders the package source code, including docstrings, as formatted HTML pages and a few other formats, like PDF, ePUB, and plain text. This is incredibly useful because it saves a lot of effort in creating the documentation.

Challenge

What do good docs have in common?

In a group, have each member open one of the following projects’ documentation:

Discuss what the common components are, what is helpful about these documentation sites, how they address the general concepts on documentation, how they’re similar and how they’re different.

All of these projects use Sphinx to generate their documentation, albeit with different themes. All of them also have the following items (except for SciPy-cookbook), which itself is complementary documentation for the SciPy package.:

  • User guide;
  • Tutorials;
  • an API reference.

Sphinx quickstart

Install Sphinx if you haven’t done so already:

BASH 

pip install sphinx

Move into the directory that is to store your documentation:

BASH 

cd docs

Start the interactive Sphinx quickstart wizard, which creates a Sphinx config file, conf.py, using your preferences.

BASH 

sphinx-quickstart

Suggested responses to the wizard’s questions:

  • Separate source and build directories? -> yes
  • Project name -> sensible to re-use the package name
  • Author name(s) -> list of authors
  • Project release -> sensible to re-use the package version specified in setup.py (see lesson 3) e.g. ‘0.1’
  • Project language -> en, but you may want to target other languages as well/instead.

This will create:

  • docs/source/conf.py -> Sphinx configuration file
  • docs/source/index.rst -> Sphinx main index page, which like almost all Sphinx content, is written in reStructured Text (like Markdown)
  • docs/Makefile -> for performing various tasks on Linux/macOS e.g. building HTML or a PDF
  • docs/make.bat -> for performing those tasks on Windows

You should now be able to build and serve this basic documentation site using:

BASH 

make html
python3 -m http.server -d build/html

When you browse to the URL shown in the output of the second command you can see your HTML documentation site but it’s looking fairly bare! Let’s learn a little more about reStructuredText then start adding some content to our documentation site.

Adding literal documentation

FIXME: RST overview

FIXME: adding pages

API Documentation

Add an api line to the index.rst so that it has a link to it.

The create an API.rst file:

BASH 

API documentation
==================
Key Points
  • Building documentation into a website is a common way of distributing it
  • Sphinx will auto build a website from plain text files and your docstrings