SPHINX-AUTOGEN(1)

✨ SPHINX-AUTOGEN(1) ✨

okay so bestie, this is the manual page for sphinx-autogen, part of the Sphinx docs toolkit 💅 let's get into it

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🌸 NAME 🌸

sphinx-autogen — generates autodoc stub pages, no cap 💖

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

sphinx-autogen [options] <sourcefile> ...

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So sphinx-autogen is this little tool that automatically generates Sphinx sources for you ✨ — the kind that, using the autodoc extension, document items that show up in autosummary listing(s). Basically it writes the boring repetitive stub files so you don't have to, and honestly? iconic behaviour.

sourcefile is the path to one or more reStructuredText documents that contain autosummary entries with the :toctree: option set. And here's the cute part — sourcefile can be an fnmatch-style pattern 🌈 so you can wildcard-match your way through a whole folder, periodt.

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

• -o <outputdir> — the directory where the output file goes. If it doesn't exist yet, it gets created (slay, it just handles that). Defaults to whatever value you passed to the :toctree: option ✨
• -s <suffix>, --suffix <suffix> — the default suffix used for the generated files. Defaults to rst 🎀
• -t <templates>, --templates <templates> — custom template directory, for when you wanna make it yours. Defaults to None 🦋
• -i, --imported-members — documents imported members too, not just the homegrown ones 💖
• -a, --respect-module-all — documents exactly the members sitting in a module's __all__ attribute. No extras, no strays, only the chosen ones 👑
• --remove-old — removes existing files in the output directory that aren't generated anymore. Spring cleaning but make it automated 🧹✨

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🌈 EXAMPLE 🌈

okay imagine bestie, you've got this directory structure going on:

docs
├── index.rst
└── ...
foobar
├── foo
│   └── __init__.py
└── bar
    ├── __init__.py
    └── baz
        └── __init__.py

and let's say docs/index.rst contained this:

Modules
=======

.. autosummary::
   :toctree: modules

   foobar.foo
   foobar.bar
   foobar.bar.baz

now if you run this:

$ PYTHONPATH=. sphinx-autogen docs/index.rst

then these stub files get created in docs 📁:

docs
├── index.rst
└── modules
    ├── foobar.bar.rst
    ├── foobar.bar.baz.rst
    └── foobar.foo.rst

and every single one of those files will contain an autodoc directive plus some other information 💖 the way it just does that for you? obsessed.

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👀 SEE ALSO 👀

• sphinx-build(1)
• sphinx-apidoc(1)

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💜 Copyright 💜

2007-2026, the Sphinx developers 🫶

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and that's the whole vibe bestie — this was sphinx-autogen version 9.1.0, dated Sep 15, 2026, brought to you by the Sphinx girlies 🌸 mwah, go generate some stubs 💅✨