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.builder.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.builder.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.builder.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.

class sphinx.builder.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.builder.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 concreate 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.builder.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.builder.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.builder.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.builder.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

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, use_modindex

html_style and html_use_modindex, respectively.

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. (XXX: document common members)

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