Invocation of sphinx-build

The sphinx-build script builds a Sphinx documentation set. It is called like this:

$ sphinx-build [options] sourcedir builddir [filenames]

where sourcedir is the source directory, and builddir is the directory in which you want to place the built documentation. Most of the time, you don’t need to specify any filenames.

The sphinx-build script has several options:

-b buildername

The most important option: it selects a builder. The most common builders are:

html

Build HTML pages. This is the default builder.

dirhtml

Build HTML pages, but with a single directory per document. Makes for prettier URLs (no .html) if served from a webserver.

singlehtml

Build a single HTML with the whole content.

htmlhelp, qthelp, devhelp, epub

Build HTML files with additional information for building a documentation collection in one of these formats.

latex

Build LaTeX sources that can be compiled to a PDF document using pdflatex.

man

Build manual pages in groff format for UNIX systems.

text

Build plain text files.

doctest

Run all doctests in the documentation, if the doctest extension is enabled.

linkcheck

Check the integrity of all external links.

See Available builders for a list of all builders shipped with Sphinx. Extensions can add their own builders.

-a

If given, always write all output files. The default is to only write output files for new and changed source files. (This may not apply to all builders.)

-E

Don’t use a saved environment (the structure caching all cross-references), but rebuild it completely. The default is to only read and parse source files that are new or have changed since the last run.

-t tag

Define the tag tag. This is relevant for only directives that only include their content if this tag is set.

New in version 0.6.

-d path

Since Sphinx has to read and parse all source files before it can write an output file, the parsed source files are cached as “doctree pickles”. Normally, these files are put in a directory called .doctrees under the build directory; with this option you can select a different cache directory (the doctrees can be shared between all builders).

-c path

Don’t look for the conf.py in the source directory, but use the given configuration directory instead. Note that various other files and paths given by configuration values are expected to be relative to the configuration directory, so they will have to be present at this location too.

New in version 0.3.

-C

Don’t look for a configuration file; only take options via the -D option.

New in version 0.5.

-D setting=value

Override a configuration value set in the conf.py file. The value must be a string or dictionary value. For the latter, supply the setting name and key like this: -D latex_elements.docclass=scrartcl. For boolean values, use 0 or 1 as the value.

Changed in version 0.6: The value can now be a dictionary value.

-A name=value

Make the name assigned to value in the HTML templates.

New in version 0.5.

-n

Run in nit-picky mode. Currently, this generates warnings for all missing references.

-N

Do not emit colored output. (On Windows, colored output is disabled in any case.)

-q

Do not output anything on standard output, only write warnings and errors to standard error.

-Q

Do not output anything on standard output, also suppress warnings. Only errors are written to standard error.

-w file

Write warnings (and errors) to the given file, in addition to standard error.

-W

Turn warnings into errors. This means that the build stops at the first warning and sphinx-build exits with exit status 1.

-P

(Useful for debugging only.) Run the Python debugger, pdb, if an unhandled exception occurs while building.

You can also give one or more filenames on the command line after the source and build directories. Sphinx will then try to build only these output files (and their dependencies).

Makefile options

The Makefile and make.bat files created by sphinx-quickstart usually run sphinx-build only with the -b and -d options. However, they support the following variables to customize behavior:

PAPER

The value for latex_paper_size.

SPHINXBUILD

The command to use instead of sphinx-build.

BUILDDIR

The build directory to use instead of the one chosen in sphinx-quickstart.

SPHINXOPTS

Additional options for sphinx-build.