Since many projects will need special features in their documentation, Sphinx allows to add “extensions” to the build process, each of which can modify almost any aspect of document processing.
This chapter describes the extensions bundled with Sphinx. For the API documentation on writing your own extension, see Developing extensions for Sphinx.
These extensions are built in and can be activated by respective entries in the extensions configuration value:
You can find several extensions contributed by users in the Sphinx Contrib repository. It is open for anyone who wants to maintain an extension publicly; just send a short message asking for write permissions.
There are also several extensions hosted elsewhere. The Wiki at BitBucket maintains a list of those.
If you write an extension that you think others will find useful or you think should be included as a part of Sphinx, please write to the project mailing list (join here).
Extensions local to a project should be put within the project’s directory structure. Set Python’s module search path, sys.path, accordingly so that Sphinx can find them. E.g., if your extension foo.py lies in the exts subdirectory of the project root, put into conf.py:
import sys, os
sys.path.append(os.path.abspath('exts'))
extensions = ['foo']
You can also install extensions anywhere else on sys.path, e.g. in the site-packages directory.