Markdown¶

Markdown is a lightweight markup language with a simplistic plain text formatting syntax. It exists in many syntactically different flavors. To support Markdown-based documentation, Sphinx can use MyST-Parser. MyST-Parser is a Docutils bridge to markdown-it-py, a Python package for parsing the CommonMark Markdown flavor.

Configuration¶

To configure your Sphinx project for Markdown support, proceed as follows:

Install the Markdown parser MyST-Parser:
```
pip install --upgrade myst-parser
```
Add myst_parser to the list of configured extensions:
```
extensions = ['myst_parser']
```
Note

MyST-Parser requires Sphinx 2.1 or newer.
If you want to use Markdown files with extensions other than .md, adjust the source_suffix variable. The following example configures Sphinx to parse all files with the extensions .md and .txt as Markdown:
```
source_suffix = {
    '.rst': 'restructuredtext',
    '.txt': 'markdown',
    '.md': 'markdown',
}
```
You can further configure MyST-Parser to allow custom syntax that standard CommonMark doesn’t support. Read more in the MyST-Parser documentation.