Question

I want to start using Sphinx to document my project. I told Sphinx to use separate source and build directories during sphinx-quickstart. Now my directory layout is the following:

MyProject/
    myproject/
        __init__.py
        mymodule.py
    docs/
        source/
            .static/
            .templates/
            conf.py
            index.rst
        build/
        Makefile

Which files should be excluded from a VCS repository for a Sphinx project (i.e., since I use Git, what should I add to my .gitignore file)? For example, should I ignore the docs/build/ directory so that changes in the HTML pages generated from Sphinx aren’t tracked?

Answer 1

If you take a look at the contents of Makefile you’ll see something as follows:

BUILDDIR      = build

...

clean:
    -rm -rf $(BUILDDIR)/*

This means that make clean just removes the build directory so, with regard to version control, ignoring the contents of the build directory should be enough as you already suspected.