mhayashi / sphinx-autobuild

Watch a Sphinx directory and rebuild the documentation when a change is detected. Also includes a livereload enabled web server.

sphinx-autobuild

Watch a Sphinx directory and rebuild the documentation when a change is detected. Also includes a livereload enabled web server.

Installation

You can use pip to install the package along with its requirements:

pip install sphinx-autobuild

Usage

The package installs a single executable script, named sphinx-autobuild. The script takes the same arguments as the sphinx-build command installed by Sphinx plus the following options:

• -p/--port option to specify the port on which the documentation shall be served (default 8000)
• -H/--host option to specify the host on which the documentation shall be served (default 127.0.0.1)
• -i/--ignore multiple allowed, option to specify file ignore glob expression when watching changes, for example: *.tmp
• -z/--watch multiple allowed, option to specify additional directories to watch, for example: some/extra/dir

To build a classical Sphinx documentation set, issue the following command:

sphinx-autobuild docs docs/_build/html

And then visit the webpage served at http://127.0.0.1:8000. Each time a change to the documentation source is detected, the HTML is rebuilt and the browser automatically reloaded.

To stop the server simply press ^C.

Makefile integration

To integrate the sphinx-autobuild command in the Makefile generated by Sphinx, add the following target:

livehtml:
    sphinx-autobuild -b html $(ALLSPHINXOPTS) $(BUILDDIR)/html

Then run with:

make livehtml