Sphinx is a documentation generator written and used by the Python community. It is written in Python, and also used in other environments.

Purpose and function

Sphinx converts reStructuredText files into

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

website A website (also written as a web site) is any web page whose content is identified by a common domain name and is published on at least one web server. Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, such as news, educatio ...

s and other formats including PDF,

EPub EPUB is an e-book file format that uses the ".epub" file extension. The term is short for ''electronic publication'' and is sometimes stylized as ''ePUB''. EPUB is supported by many e-readers, and compatible software is available for most smart ...

, Texinfo and

man A man is an adult male human. Before adulthood, a male child or adolescent is referred to as a boy. Like most other male mammals, a man's genome usually inherits an X chromosome from the mother and a Y chromosome from the f ...

. 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. Popular themes that can be installed as Python modules include: * Read the Docs * Sphinx Bootstrap * Guzzle * Documatt

History and use

The first public release, version 0.1.61611, was announced on March 21, 2008. It was developed for, and is used extensively by, the Python project for documentation. Since its introduction in 2008, Sphinx has been adopted by many other important Python projects, including

Bazaar A bazaar or souk is a marketplace consisting of multiple small Market stall, stalls or shops, especially in the Middle East, the Balkans, Central Asia, North Africa and South Asia. They are traditionally located in vaulted or covered streets th ...

, SQLAlchemy, MayaVi, SageMath, SciPy, Django and Pylons. It is also used for the Blender user manual and Python API documentation. In 2010, Eric Holscher announced 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. * Talk at LCA2016: * Talk at LCA2017:

References

External links