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
• -B/--open-browser automatically open a web browser with the URL for this document
• --no-initial disable initial build
• -s/--delay delay in seconds before opening browser if --open-browser was selected (default 5)
• -z/--watch multiple allowed, option to specify additional directories to watch, for example: some/extra/dir
• --poll force polling, useful for Vagrant or VirtualBox which do not trigger file updates in shared folders

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

Automatically starting a browser

If you work on multiple Sphinx document repositories at one time (e.g., when working with related documents that have cross-referencing intersphinx links), managing multiple browser windows and manually selecting port numbers becomes difficult and tedious. By selecting --port 0 on the command line, sphinx-autobuild will use port-for to generate a random high-numbered port that is not currently being used.

To further simplify life, use the -B (--open-browser) option to trigger livereload's capability of automatically opening a browser window. Use -s (--delay) to change the number of seconds to delay before starting the browser, and you may need to do something like the following to ensure that all cached content is removed before sphinx-autobuild starts watching files to fully render the document properly:

# Clean out any cached content before starting.
make clean 2>/dev/null

# Background a trigger for initial build of all files.
(sleep 1 && touch source/*.rst) &

sphinx-autobuild -q \
        -p 0 \
        --open-browser \
        --delay 5 \
        --ignore "*.swp" \
        --ignore "*.pdf" \
        --ignore "*.log" \
        --ignore "*.out" \
        --ignore "*.toc" \
        --ignore "*.aux" \
        --ignore "*.idx" \
        --ignore "*.ind" \
        --ignore "*.ilg" \
        --ignore "*.tex" \
        source \
        build/html