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://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 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 :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 to output.txt in the output directory.

Its name is linkcheck.

Built-in Sphinx extensions that offer more builders are:

• doctest
• coverage