What is Sphinx & how does it work?

Sphinx is what is called a documentation generator. This means that it takes a bunch of source files in plain text, and generates a bunch of other awesome things, mainly HTML. For our use case you can think of it as a program that takes in plain text files in reStructuredText format, and outputs HTML.

What is the Sphinx tutorial?

The tutorial is aimed towards Sphinx newcomers willing to learn the fundamentals of how projects are created and structured. You will create a fictional software library to generate random food recipes that will serve as a guide throughout the process, with the objective of properly documenting it.

How to build a DOC in Sphinx?

Now that you have added some files and content, let’s make a first build of the docs. A build is started with the sphinx-build program: where sourcedir is the source directory, and outputdir is the directory in which you want to place the built documentation. The -M option selects a builder; in this example Sphinx will build HTML files.

Does Sphinx support docstrings?

When documenting Python code, it is common to put a lot of documentation in the source files, in documentation strings. Sphinx supports the inclusion of docstrings from your modules with an extension (an extension is a Python module that provides additional features for Sphinx projects) called autodoc.