Advanced Sphinx usage

Jupyter Book uses the excellent documentation tool Sphinx to build your book and manage citations, cross-references, and extensibility.

While Jupyter Book comes pre-configured with several Sphinx extensions, power-users may wish to add their own extensions and configuration. This page describes how to do so.

警告

Adding your own Sphinx configuration and extensions may cause Jupyter Book to behave unpredictably. Use at your own risk!

Custom Sphinx extensions

To enable your own Sphinx extensions when building a Jupyter Book, use the following configuration in your _config.yml file:

sphinx:
  extra_extensions:
   - extension1
   - extension2

Any extensions that are listed will be appended to the list of Sphinx extensions at build time.

注解

Make sure that you have your extension installed on your machine, or Sphinx won’t know how to build the extensions.

An example: sphinx-inline-tabs

By default, Jupyter Book ships with tabs via sphinx-panels. There are other packages for tabs in the Sphinx ecosystem with different functionality. One-such package is sphinx-inline-tabs, which allows for syncronized tabs in case you’d like your tabs to shift across the page at the same time.

sphinx-inline-tabs is not included with Jupyter Book by default, but we can activate it with Jupyter Book like so:

  • Install sphinx-inline-tabs. Here’s the command to do so:

    pip install sphinx-inline-tabs
    
  • Add sphinx-inline-tabs content to your book. Here’s an example with MyST Markdown:

    First two tabs showing off defining a function.
    
    ````{tab} Python
    ```python
    def main():
        return
    ```
    ````
    ````{tab} C++
    ```c++
    int main(const int argc, const char **argv) {
      return 0;
    }
    ```
    ````
    
    Second two tabs showing off printing.
    
    ````{tab} Python
    ```python
    print("Hello World!")
    ```
    ````
    
    ````{tab} C++
    ```c++
    #include <iostream>
    
    int main() {
      std::cout << "Hello World!" << std::endl;
    }
    ```
    ````
    
  • Activate sphinx-inline-tabs in _config.yml. The sphinx-inline-tabs documentation says we activate it in Sphinx by adding extensions = ["sphinx_inline_tabs"], so we’ll add it to our Jupyter Book like so:

    sphinx:
      extra_extensions:
      - sphinx_inline_tabs
    

Now, Jupyter Book will know how to interpret the {tab} directive (and any other directives that sphinx-inline-tabs supports).

For example, here is a rendered version of the tab code pasted above:

First two tabs showing off defining a function.

def main():
    return
int main(const int argc, const char **argv) {
  return 0;
}

Second two tabs showing off printing.

print("Hello World!")
#include <iostream>

int main() {
  std::cout << "Hello World!" << std::endl;
}

Local Sphinx Extensions

Sphinx is able to use local extensions by adding additional directories to the Python path. You can use local extensions by specifying them as local_extensions in the _config.yml file.

To add a local extension that requires a path, use:

sphinx:
  local_extensions:
    <name>: <path>

This will append to the list of extensions already loaded by Jupyter Book and update the sys.path so the local extension can be found.

Manual Sphinx configuration

You may also directly override the key-value pairs that Sphinx normally has you configure in conf.py. To do so, use the following section of _config.yml:

sphinx:
  config:
    key1: value1
    key2: value2

警告

Any options set in this section will override default configurations set by Jupyter Book. Use at your own risk!

小技巧

If you wish to inspect a conf.py representation of the generated configuration, which Jupyter Book will pass to Sphinx, you can run from the command-line:

jb config sphinx mybookname/

Fine control of parsing and execution

As discussed in the components of Jupyter Book, two of the main components of Jupyter Book are Sphinx extensions; MyST-Parser for Markdown parsing, and MyST-NB for notebook execution and output rendering.

These two extensions are highly customizable via Sphinx configuration. Some of their configuration is already exposed in the _config.yml, but you can also directly set configuration, see:

Defining TeX macros

You can add LaTeX macros for the whole book by defining them under the Macros option of the TeX block. For example, the following two macros have been pre-defined in the Sphinx configuration

sphinx:
  config:
    mathjax_config:
      TeX:
        Macros:
          "N": "\\mathbb{N}"
          "floor": ["\\lfloor#1\\rfloor", 1]
          "bmat" : ["\\left[\\begin{array}"]
          "emat" : ["\\end{array}\\right]"]

You can also define TeX macros for a specific file by introducing them at the beginning of the file under a math directive. For example

```{math}

\newcommand\N{\mathbb{N}}
\newcommand\floor[1]{\lfloor#1\rfloor}
\newcommand{\bmat}{\left[\begin{array}}
\newcommand{\emat}{\end{array}\right]}
```

The commands can be used inside a math directive, $$, or in-line $. For example,

$$
A = \bmat{} 1 & 1 \\ 2 & 1\\ 3 & 2 \emat{},\ b=\bmat{} 2\\ 3 \\ 4\emat{},\ \gamma = 0.5
$$

will be rendered as:

\[\begin{split} A = \bmat{} 1 & 1 \\ 2 & 1\\ 3 & 2 \emat{},\ b=\bmat{} 2\\ 3 \\ 4\emat{},\ \gamma = 0.5 \end{split}\]

重要

To have “bare” LaTeX rendered in HTML, enable the amsmath extension in your _config.yml:

parse:
  myst_enable_extensions:
    # don't forget to list any other extensions you want enabled,
    # including those that are enabled by default!
    - amsmath

Then you can include:

\begin{equation}
  \int_0^\infty \frac{x^3}{e^x-1}\,dx = \frac{\pi^4}{15}
\end{equation}

which renders as

(5)\[\begin{equation} \int_0^\infty \frac{x^3}{e^x-1}\,dx = \frac{\pi^4}{15} \end{equation}\]

Enable a custom Sphinx builder from the CLI

You can initiate builds for a custom builder using:

jb build <project> --builder=custom --custom-builder=<builder-name>

Advanced sphinx users may find an extension that builds a different type of output from the Sphinx AST such as sphinx-tojupyter which is an extension for building notebooks that only includes basic markdown.

警告

sphinx-tojupyter will be deprecated once myst syntax rendering support is available in jupyter notebooks.

You can enable the jupyter builder by adding it to the _config.yml

sphinx:
  extra_extensions: [sphinx_tojupyter]

and using the custom option via jupyter-book:

jb build <project> --builder=custom --custom-builder=jupyter

警告

Developers: When using other output targets, the package will need to support specifying the mime type priority for myst_nb compatibility.

See this code for further details