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Purpose and function

Sphinx converts reStructuredText files into HTML websites and other formats including PDF, EPub, Texinfo and man.

reStructuredText is extensible, and Sphinx exploits its extensible nature through a number of extensions – for autogenerating documentation from source code, writing mathematical notation or highlighting source code, etc.

HTML themes

Sphinx provides the ability to apply themes to HTML and HTML-based formats. Sphinx has several built-in themes, including alabaster, classic, sphinxdoc, and scrolls.¹ Popular themes that can be installed as Python modules include:²

• Read the Docs³
• Sphinx Bootstrap⁴
• Guzzle⁵
• Documatt⁶

History and use

The first public release, version 0.1.61611, was announced on March 21, 2008.⁷ It was developed for, and is used extensively by, the Python project for documentation.⁸

Since its introduction in 2008, Sphinx has been adopted by many other important Python projects, including Bazaar, SQLAlchemy, MayaVi, SageMath, SciPy, Django and Pylons. It is also used for the Blender user manual⁹ and Python API documentation.¹⁰

In 2010, Eric Holscher announced¹¹ the creation of the Read the Docs project as part of an effort to make maintenance of software documentation easier. Read the Docs automates the process of building and uploading Sphinx documentation after every commit.

Linux kernel

The Linux kernel's documentation subsystem underwent changes in 2016. Starting in the 4.7 cycle, the documentation started switching over to use Sphinx.¹²

• Talk at LCA2016: What I've learned as the kernel docs maintainer on YouTube
• Talk at LCA2017: Kernel documentation: what we have and where it's going on YouTube

See also

• Free and open-source software portal

• Comparison of documentation generators
• Read the Docs
• reStructuredText

External links

• Sphinx documentation generator project website
• Read the Docs large-scale, collaborative documentation host powered by Sphinx

References

1. "HTML Theming". Sphinx documentation. Georg Brandl and the Sphinx team. Retrieved 2022-06-25. https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/theming.html ↩

2. "Sphinx Themes". Write the Docs. Retrieved 2022-06-25. https://www.writethedocs.org/guide/tools/sphinx-themes/ ↩

3. "Read the Docs Sphinx Theme". sphinx-rtd-theme code repository. GitHub. Retrieved 2022-06-25. https://github.com/readthedocs/sphinx_rtd_theme ↩

4. "Sphinx Bootstrap Theme". sphinx_bootstrap_theme code repository. GitHub. Retrieved 2022-06-25. https://github.com/ryan-roemer/sphinx-bootstrap-theme ↩

5. "Guzzle Sphinx Theme". guzzle_sphinx_theme code repository. GitHub. Retrieved 2022-06-25. https://github.com/guzzle/guzzle_sphinx_theme ↩

6. "Documatt Sphinx Themes Collection". Documatt.com. Retrieved 2022-06-25. https://documatt.gitlab.io/sphinx-themes/themes/documatt.html ↩

7. "Sphinx is released! » And now for something completely Pythonic..." And now for something completely Pythonic... Georg Brandl. Archived from the original on 2012-03-22. Retrieved 2011-04-03. https://web.archive.org/web/20120322064904/http://pythonic.pocoo.org/2008/3/21/sphinx-is-released ↩

8. "About these documents — Python v2.7.1 documentation". Python documentation. Python Software Foundation. Retrieved 2011-04-03. https://docs.python.org/about.html ↩

9. "Blender User Manual". Blender Wiki. Blender Foundation. https://www.blender.org/manual/about/contribute/index.html ↩

10. "Dev:2.5/Py/API/Generating API Reference - BlenderWiki!". Blender Foundation. http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.5/Py/API/Generating_API_Reference ↩

11. "Announcing Read The Docs". Python Software Foundation News. Eric Holscher. Retrieved 2015-02-15. http://ericholscher.com/blog/2010/aug/16/announcing-read-docs/ ↩

12. "Kernel documentation update". LWN.net. 2016-11-02. https://lwn.net/Articles/705224/ ↩