Mintlify
Docs automation and analytics for engineering teams
Open-Source Projects
Discover top open-source software, updated regularly with real-world adoption signals.
Discover top open-source software, updated regularly with real-world adoption signals.
Create intelligent, beautiful documentation from reStructuredText with ease
Sphinx transforms reStructuredText into HTML, PDF, EPUB, and more, offering automatic cross‑references, indexing, code highlighting, and a rich extension ecosystem for developers and technical writers.
Sphinx is a documentation generator that reads reStructuredText sources and produces a variety of output formats such as HTML, PDF, EPUB, LaTeX, and manual pages. It is widely adopted by Python projects, open‑source libraries, and enterprises that need reliable, versioned documentation.
Technical writers, developers, and DevOps teams use Sphinx to create API references, tutorials, and release notes. By defining a hierarchical document tree, Sphinx automatically creates cross‑references, indices, and navigation links. Extensions written in Python or Jinja2 templates allow deep customization of the look and feel, while the built‑in Pygments highlighter adds syntax coloring for many programming languages. Installation is as simple as pip install -U sphinx; documentation builds can be integrated into CI pipelines or run locally.
Generated files are static and can be served from any web server, CDN, or documentation hosting service such as Read the Docs. The tool works on all platforms that support Python, making it suitable for cross‑platform projects.
When teams consider Sphinx, these hosted platforms usually appear on the same shortlist.
Looking for a hosted option? These are the services engineering teams benchmark against before choosing open source.
API reference generation
Produce up‑to‑date HTML and PDF API docs directly from source code docstrings.
Software tutorial site
Build a searchable, multi‑page tutorial with highlighted code examples and automatic navigation.
Release notes portal
Automatically generate versioned changelogs with cross‑links between releases.
Scientific publication
Export reStructuredText to LaTeX or EPUB for academic distribution with proper formatting.
Sphinx primarily uses reStructuredText, though extensions enable Markdown support.
Yes, Sphinx can produce PDF output via LaTeX or direct PDF builders.
Yes, it supports a rich ecosystem of extensions and custom Jinja2 templates.
Install with pip: `pip install -U sphinx`.
Generated static files can be served from any web server, CDN, or services like Read the Docs.
Project at a glance
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