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 document markup/rest.rst will not result in an output file markup/rest.html, but markup/rest/index.html. When generating links between pages, the index.html is omitted, so that the URL would look like markup/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://idpf.org/epub or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB. The builder creates EPUB 2 files.

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 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 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 man_pages configuration value.

Its name is man.

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 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 name web still works as well.)

The file suffix is .fpickle. The global context is called globalcontext.pickle, the search index searchindex.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 called globalcontext.json, the search index searchindex.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 and deprecated directives for the current 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 to output.txt in the output directory.

Its name is linkcheck.

class sphinx.builders.xml.XMLBuilder¶

This builder produces Docutils-native XML files. The output can be transformed with standard XML tools such as XSLT processors into arbitrary final forms.

Its name is xml.

New in version 1.2.

class sphinx.builders.xml.PseudoXMLBuilder¶

This builder is used for debugging the Sphinx/Docutils “Reader to Transform to Writer” pipeline. It produces compact pretty-printed “pseudo-XML”, files where nesting is indicated by indentation (no end-tags). External attributes for all elements are output, and internal attributes for any leftover “pending” elements are also given.

Its name is pseudoxml.

New in version 1.2.

Built-in Sphinx extensions that offer more builders are:

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 the toc contains more than one entry.
current_page_name: The document name of the current file.
parents, prev and next: Information about related chapters in the TOC tree. Each relation is a dictionary with the keys link (HREF for the relation) and title (title of the related document, as HTML). parents is a list of relations, while prev and next 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: 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.

Todo

Document common members.

Unlike the other pickle files this pickle file requires that the sphinx package is available on unpickling.

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