Contributing to Sphinx¶

There are many ways you can contribute to Sphinx, be it filing bug reports or feature requests, writing new documentation or submitting patches for new or fixed behavior. This guide serves to illustrate how you can get started with this.

Get help¶

The Sphinx community maintains a number of mailing lists and IRC channels.

Stack Overflow with tag python-sphinx: Questions and answers about use and development.
GitHub Discussions Q&A: Question-and-answer style forum for discussions.
sphinx-users <sphinx-users@googlegroups.com>: Mailing list for user support.
sphinx-dev <sphinx-dev@googlegroups.com>: Mailing list for development related discussions.
#sphinx-doc on irc.libera.chat: IRC channel for development questions and user support.

Bug Reports and Feature Requests¶

If you have encountered a problem with Sphinx or have an idea for a new feature, please submit it to the issue tracker on GitHub.

For bug reports, please include the output produced during the build process and also the log file Sphinx creates after it encounters an unhandled exception. The location of this file should be shown towards the end of the error message. Please also include the output of sphinx-build --bug-report.

Including or providing a link to the source files involved may help us fix the issue. If possible, try to create a minimal project that produces the error and post that instead.

Contribute code¶

The Sphinx source code is managed using Git and is hosted on GitHub. The recommended way for new contributors to submit code to Sphinx is to fork this repository and submit a pull request after committing changes to their fork. The pull request will then need to be approved by one of the core developers before it is merged into the main repository.

Getting started¶

Before starting on a patch, we recommend checking for open issues or opening a fresh issue to start a discussion around a feature idea or a bug. If you feel uncomfortable or uncertain about an issue or your changes, feel free to start a discussion.

These are the basic steps needed to start developing on Sphinx.

Create an account on GitHub.
Fork the main Sphinx repository (sphinx-doc/sphinx) using the GitHub interface.

Clone the forked repository to your machine.

git clone https://github.com/<USERNAME>/sphinx
cd sphinx

Setup a virtual environment.

This is not necessary for unit testing, thanks to tox, but it is necessary if you wish to run sphinx-build locally or run unit tests without the help of tox:
```
virtualenv ~/.venv
. ~/.venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .
```
Create a new working branch. Choose any name you like.
```
git switch -c feature-xyz
```
Hack, hack, hack.

Write your code along with tests that shows that the bug was fixed or that the feature works as expected.
Add a bullet point to CHANGES.rst if the fix or feature is not trivial (small doc updates, typo fixes), then commit:
```
git commit -m '#42: Add useful new feature that does this.'
```
GitHub recognizes certain phrases that can be used to automatically update the issue tracker. For example:
```
git commit -m 'Closes #42: Fix invalid markup in docstring of Foo.bar.'
```
would close issue #42.
Push changes in the branch to your forked repository on GitHub:
```
git push origin feature-xyz
```
Submit a pull request from your branch to the master branch.
Wait for a core developer or contributor to review your changes.

Coding style¶

Please follow these guidelines when writing code for Sphinx:

Try to use the same code style as used in the rest of the project.
For non-trivial changes, please update the CHANGES.rst file. If your changes alter existing behavior, please document this.
New features should be documented. Include examples and use cases where appropriate. If possible, include a sample that is displayed in the generated output.
When adding a new configuration variable, be sure to document it and update sphinx/cmd/quickstart.py if it’s important enough.
Add appropriate unit tests.

Style and type checks can be run as follows:

ruff check .
mypy

Unit tests¶

Sphinx is tested using pytest for Python code and Jasmine for JavaScript.

To run Python unit tests, we recommend using tox, which provides a number of targets and allows testing against multiple different Python environments:

To list all possible targets:
```
tox -av
```
To run unit tests for a specific Python version, such as Python 3.12:
```
tox -e py312
```
Arguments to pytest can be passed via tox, e.g., in order to run a particular test:
```
tox -e py312 tests/test_module.py::test_new_feature
```

You can also test by installing dependencies in your local environment:

pip install .[test]

To run JavaScript tests, use npm:

npm install
npm run test

Tip

jasmine requires a Firefox binary to use as a test browser.

On Unix systems, you can check the presence and location of the firefox binary at the command-line by running command -v firefox.

New unit tests should be included in the tests/ directory where necessary:

For bug fixes, first add a test that fails without your changes and passes after they are applied.
Tests that need a sphinx-build run should be integrated in one of the existing test modules if possible.
Tests should be quick and only test the relevant components, as we aim that the test suite should not take more than a minute to run. In general, avoid using the app fixture and app.build() unless a full integration test is required.

Added in version 1.8: Sphinx also runs JavaScript tests.

Changed in version 1.5.2: Sphinx was switched from nose to pytest.

Contribute documentation¶

Contributing to documentation involves modifying the source files found in the doc/ folder. To get started, you should first follow Getting started, and then take the steps below to work with the documentation.

The following sections describe how to get started with contributing documentation, as well as key aspects of a few different tools that we use.

Build the documentation¶

To build the documentation, run the following command:

sphinx-build -M html ./doc ./build/sphinx --fail-on-warning

This will parse the Sphinx documentation’s source files and generate HTML for you to preview in build/sphinx/html.

You can also build a live version of the documentation that you can preview in the browser. It will detect changes and reload the page any time you make edits. To do so, run the following command:

sphinx-autobuild ./doc ./build/sphinx/

Translations¶

The parts of messages in Sphinx that go into builds are translated into several locales. The translations are kept as gettext .po files translated from the master template sphinx/locale/sphinx.pot.

Sphinx uses Babel to extract messages and maintain the catalog files. The utils directory contains a helper script, babel_runner.py.

Use python babel_runner.py extract to update the .pot template.
Use python babel_runner.py update to update all existing language catalogs in sphinx/locale/*/LC_MESSAGES with the current messages in the template file.
Use python babel_runner.py compile to compile the .po files to binary .mo files and .js files.

When an updated .po file is submitted, run python babel_runner.py compile to commit both the source and the compiled catalogs.

When a new locale is submitted, add a new directory with the ISO 639-1 language identifier and put sphinx.po in there. Don’t forget to update the possible values for language in doc/usage/configuration.rst.

The Sphinx core messages can also be translated on Transifex. There tx client tool, which is provided by the transifex_client Python package, can be used to pull translations in .po format from Transifex. To do this, go to sphinx/locale and then run tx pull -f -l LANG where LANG is an existing language identifier. It is good practice to run python babel_runner.py update afterwards to make sure the .po file has the canonical Babel formatting.

Debugging tips¶

Delete the build cache before building documents if you make changes in the code by running the command make clean or using the sphinx-build --fresh-env option.
Use the sphinx-build --pdb option to run pdb on exceptions.
Use node.pformat() and node.asdom().toxml() to generate a printable representation of the document structure.
Set the configuration variable keep_warnings to True so warnings will be displayed in the generated output.
Set the configuration variable nitpicky to True so that Sphinx will complain about references without a known target.
Set the debugging options in the Docutils configuration file.

Updating generated files¶

JavaScript stemming algorithms in sphinx/search/non-minified-js/*.js are generated using snowball by cloning the repository, executing make dist_libstemmer_js and then unpacking the tarball which is generated in dist directory.

Minified files in sphinx/search/minified-js/*.js are generated from non-minified ones using uglifyjs (installed via npm), with -m option to enable mangling.
The searchindex.js files found in the tests/js/fixtures/* directories are generated by using the standard Sphinx HTML builder on the corresponding input projects found in tests/js/roots/*. The fixtures provide test data used by the Sphinx JavaScript unit tests, and can be regenerated by running the utils/generate_js_fixtures.py script.