Developer(s) Georg Brandl Written in Python | Preview release 1.4.9 | |
Initial release March 21, 2008 (2008-03-21) Stable release 1.4.8 / August 20, 2016; 7 months ago (2016-08-20) Repository github.com/sphinx-doc/sphinx | ||
Sphinx is a documentation generator written and used by the Python community. It is written in Python, and also used in other environments.
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Purpose and Function
Sphinx converts reStructuredText files into HTML websites and other formats including PDF, EPub and man.
reStructuredText is extensible, and Sphinx exploits its extensible nature through a number of extensions – for autogenerating documentation from source code, writing mathematical notation or highlighting source code, etc.
History and Use
The first public release, version 0.1.61611, was announced on March 21, 2008. It was developed for, and used extensively by, the Python project for documentation.
Since its introduction in 2008, Sphinx has been adopted by many other important Python projects, including Bazaar, SQLAlchemy, MayaVi, SageMath, SciPy, Django and Pylons. It is also used for the Blender user manual and Python API documentation.
In 2010, Eric Holscher announced the creation of the Read the Docs project as part of an effort to make maintenance of software documentation easier. Read the Docs automates the process of building and uploading Sphinx documentation after every commit.
Linux kernel
The Linux kernel's documentation "subsystem" did undergo some changes in 2016. Starting in the 4.7 cycle, the documentation began being switched to use the Sphinx documentation generator.