Available builders
These are the built-in Sphinx builders. More builders can be added by extensions.
The builder’s “name” must be given to the -b command-line option of sphinx-build to select a builder.
- class
sphinx.builders.html.
StandaloneHTMLBuilder
This is the standard HTML builder. Its output is a directory with HTML files, complete with style sheets and optionally the reST sources. There are quite a few configuration values that customize the output of this builder, see the chapter Options for HTML output for details.
Its name is
html
.
- class
sphinx.builders.html.
DirectoryHTMLBuilder
This is a subclass of the standard HTML builder. Its output is a directory with HTML files, where each file is called
index.html
and placed in a subdirectory named like its page name. For example, the documentmarkup/rest.rst
will not result in an output filemarkup/rest.html
, butmarkup/rest/index.html
. When generating links between pages, theindex.html
is omitted, so that the URL would look likemarkup/rest/
.Its name is
dirhtml
.New in version 0.6.
- class
sphinx.builders.html.
SingleFileHTMLBuilder
This is an HTML builder that combines the whole project in one output file. (Obviously this only works with smaller projects.) The file is named like the master document. No indices will be generated.
Its name is
singlehtml
.New in version 1.0.
- class
sphinx.builders.htmlhelp.
HTMLHelpBuilder
This builder produces the same output as the standalone HTML builder, but also generates HTML Help support files that allow the Microsoft HTML Help Workshop to compile them into a CHM file.
Its name is
htmlhelp
.
- class
sphinx.builders.qthelp.
QtHelpBuilder
This builder produces the same output as the standalone HTML builder, but also generates Qt help collection support files that allow the Qt collection generator to compile them.
Its name is
qthelp
.
- class
sphinx.builders.devhelp.
DevhelpBuilder
This builder produces the same output as the standalone HTML builder, but also generates GNOME Devhelp support file that allows the GNOME Devhelp reader to view them.
Its name is
devhelp
.
- class
sphinx.builders.epub.
EpubBuilder
This builder produces the same output as the standalone HTML builder, but also generates an epub file for ebook readers. See Epub info for details about it. For definition of the epub format, have a look at http://www.idpf.org/specs.htm or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB.
Some ebook readers do not show the link targets of references. Therefore this builder adds the targets after the link when necessary. The display of the URLs can be customized by adding CSS rules for the class
link-target
.Its name is
epub
.
- class
sphinx.builders.latex.
LaTeXBuilder
This builder produces a bunch of LaTeX files in the output directory. You have to specify which documents are to be included in which LaTeX files via the :confval:`latex_documents` configuration value. There are a few configuration values that customize the output of this builder, see the chapter Options for LaTeX output for details.
Note
The produced LaTeX file uses several LaTeX packages that may not be present in a “minimal” TeX distribution installation. For TeXLive, the following packages need to be installed:
- latex-recommended
- latex-extra
- fonts-recommended
Its name is
latex
.
Note that a direct PDF builder using ReportLab is available in rst2pdf version 0.12 or greater. You need to add 'rst2pdf.pdfbuilder'
to your :confval:`extensions` to enable it, its name is pdf
. Refer to the rst2pdf manual for details.
- class
sphinx.builders.text.
TextBuilder
This builder produces a text file for each reST file – this is almost the same as the reST source, but with much of the markup stripped for better readability.
Its name is
text
.New in version 0.4.
- class
sphinx.builders.manpage.
ManualPageBuilder
This builder produces manual pages in the groff format. You have to specify which documents are to be included in which manual pages via the :confval:`man_pages` configuration value.
Its name is
man
.Note
This builder requires the docutils manual page writer, which is only available as of docutils 0.6.
New in version 1.0.
- class
sphinx.builders.texinfo.
TexinfoBuilder
This builder produces Texinfo files that can be processed into Info files by the makeinfo program. You have to specify which documents are to be included in which Texinfo files via the :confval:`texinfo_documents` configuration value.
The Info format is the basis of the on-line help system used by GNU Emacs and the terminal-based program info. See Texinfo info for more details. The Texinfo format is the official documentation system used by the GNU project. More information on Texinfo can be found at http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/.
Its name is
texinfo
.New in version 1.1.
- class
sphinx.builders.html.
SerializingHTMLBuilder
This builder uses a module that implements the Python serialization API (pickle, simplejson, phpserialize, and others) to dump the generated HTML documentation. The pickle builder is a subclass of it.
A concrete subclass of this builder serializing to the PHP serialization format could look like this:
import phpserialize class PHPSerializedBuilder(SerializingHTMLBuilder): name = 'phpserialized' implementation = phpserialize out_suffix = '.file.phpdump' globalcontext_filename = 'globalcontext.phpdump' searchindex_filename = 'searchindex.phpdump'
implementation
A module that implements dump(), load(), dumps() and loads() functions that conform to the functions with the same names from the pickle module. Known modules implementing this interface are simplejson (or json in Python 2.6), phpserialize, plistlib, and others.
out_suffix
The suffix for all regular files.
globalcontext_filename
The filename for the file that contains the “global context”. This is a dict with some general configuration values such as the name of the project.
searchindex_filename
The filename for the search index Sphinx generates.
See Serialization builder details for details about the output format.
New in version 0.5.
- class
sphinx.builders.html.
PickleHTMLBuilder
This builder produces a directory with pickle files containing mostly HTML fragments and TOC information, for use of a web application (or custom postprocessing tool) that doesn’t use the standard HTML templates.
See Serialization builder details for details about the output format.
Its name is
pickle
. (The old nameweb
still works as well.)The file suffix is
.fpickle
. The global context is calledglobalcontext.pickle
, the search indexsearchindex.pickle
.
- class
sphinx.builders.html.
JSONHTMLBuilder
This builder produces a directory with JSON files containing mostly HTML fragments and TOC information, for use of a web application (or custom postprocessing tool) that doesn’t use the standard HTML templates.
See Serialization builder details for details about the output format.
Its name is
json
.The file suffix is
.fjson
. The global context is calledglobalcontext.json
, the search indexsearchindex.json
.New in version 0.5.
- class
sphinx.builders.gettext.
MessageCatalogBuilder
This builder produces gettext-style message catalogs. Each top-level file or subdirectory grows a single
.pot
catalog template.See the documentation on Internationalization for further reference.
Its name is
gettext
.New in version 1.1.
- class
sphinx.builders.changes.
ChangesBuilder
This builder produces an HTML overview of all
versionadded
,versionchanged
anddeprecated
directives for the current :confval:`version`. This is useful to generate a ChangeLog file, for example.Its name is
changes
.
- class
sphinx.builders.linkcheck.
CheckExternalLinksBuilder
This builder scans all documents for external links, tries to open them with
urllib2
, and writes an overview which ones are broken and redirected to standard output and tooutput.txt
in the output directory.Its name is
linkcheck
.
Built-in Sphinx extensions that offer more builders are:
doctest
coverage
Serialization builder details
All serialization builders outputs one file per source file and a few special files. They also copy the reST source files in the directory _sources
under the output directory.
The PickleHTMLBuilder
is a builtin subclass that implements the pickle serialization interface.
The files per source file have the extensions of out_suffix
, and are arranged in directories just as the source files are. They unserialize to a dictionary (or dictionary like structure) with these keys:
body
- The HTML “body” (that is, the HTML rendering of the source file), as rendered by the HTML translator.
title
- The title of the document, as HTML (may contain markup).
toc
- The table of contents for the file, rendered as an HTML
<ul>
. display_toc
- A boolean that is
True
if thetoc
contains more than one entry. current_page_name
- The document name of the current file.
parents
,prev
andnext
- Information about related chapters in the TOC tree. Each relation is a dictionary with the keys
link
(HREF for the relation) andtitle
(title of the related document, as HTML).parents
is a list of relations, whileprev
andnext
are a single relation. sourcename
- The name of the source file under
_sources
.
The special files are located in the root output directory. They are:
SerializingHTMLBuilder.globalcontext_filename
A pickled dict with these keys:
project
,copyright
,release
,version
- The same values as given in the configuration file.
style
- :confval:`html_style`.
last_updated
- Date of last build.
builder
- Name of the used builder, in the case of pickles this is always
'pickle'
. titles
- A dictionary of all documents’ titles, as HTML strings.
SerializingHTMLBuilder.searchindex_filename
An index that can be used for searching the documentation. It is a pickled list with these entries:
- A list of indexed docnames.
- A list of document titles, as HTML strings, in the same order as the first list.
- A dict mapping word roots (processed by an English-language stemmer) to a list of integers, which are indices into the first list.
environment.pickle
The build environment. This is always a pickle file, independent of the builder and a copy of the environment that was used when the builder was started.
Unlike the other pickle files this pickle file requires that the
sphinx
package is available on unpickling.