Welcome¶
Sphinx makes it easy to create intelligent and beautiful documentation.
Here are some of Sphinx’s major features:
Output formats: HTML (including Windows HTML Help), LaTeX (for printable PDF versions), ePub, Texinfo, manual pages, plain text
Extensive cross-references: semantic markup and automatic links for functions, classes, citations, glossary terms and similar pieces of information
Hierarchical structure: easy definition of a document tree, with automatic links to siblings, parents and children
Automatic indices: general index as well as a language-specific module indices
Code handling: automatic highlighting using the Pygments highlighter
Extensions: automatic testing of code snippets, inclusion of docstrings from Python modules (API docs) via built-in extensions, and much more functionality via third-party extensions.
Themes: modify the look and feel of outputs via creating themes, and re-use many third-party themes.
Contributed extensions: dozens of extensions contributed by users; most of them installable from PyPI.
Sphinx uses the reStructuredText markup language by default, and can read MyST markdown via third-party extensions. Both of these are powerful and straightforward to use, and have functionality for complex documentation and publishing workflows. They both build upon Docutils to parse and write documents.
See below for how to navigate Sphinx’s documentation.
See also
The Sphinx documentation Table of Contents has a full list of this site’s pages.
Get started¶
These sections cover the basics of getting started with Sphinx, including creating and building your own documentation from scratch.
User Guides¶
These sections cover various topics in using and extending Sphinx for various use-cases. They are a comprehensive guide to using Sphinx in many contexts and assume more knowledge of Sphinx. If you are new to Sphinx, we recommend starting with Get started.
Community guide¶
Sphinx is community supported and welcomes contributions from anybody. The sections below should help you get started joining the Sphinx community as well as contributing.
See the Sphinx contributors’ guide if you would like to contribute to the project.
Reference guide¶
Reference documentation is more complete and programmatic in nature, it is a collection of information that can be quickly referenced. If you would like usecase-driven documentation, see Get started or User Guides.
Reference
- Command-Line Tools
- Configuration
- Project information
- General configuration
- Options for internationalization
- Options for Math
- Options for HTML output
- Options for Single HTML output
- Options for HTML help output
- Options for Apple Help output
- Options for epub output
- Options for LaTeX output
- Options for text output
- Options for manual page output
- Options for Texinfo output
- Options for QtHelp output
- Options for the linkcheck builder
- Options for the XML builder
- Options for the C domain
- Options for the C++ domain
- Options for the Python domain
- Example of configuration file
- Extensions
- reStructuredText
- Glossary
- Changelog
- Projects using Sphinx
- Documentation using the alabaster theme
- Documentation using the classic theme
- Documentation using the sphinxdoc theme
- Documentation using the nature theme
- Documentation using another builtin theme
- Documentation using sphinx_rtd_theme
- Documentation using sphinx_bootstrap_theme
- Documentation using pydata_sphinx_theme
- Documentation using a custom theme or integrated in a website
- Homepages and other non-documentation sites
- Books produced using Sphinx
- Theses produced using Sphinx
- Projects integrating Sphinx functionality