How to get a list of warnings from sphinx compilation

Question

I am developing a sphinx based collaborative writing tool. Users access the web application (developed in python/Flask) to write a book in sphinx and compile it to pdf.

Answer 1

Assuming you used sphinx-quickstart to generate your initial Sphinx documentation set with a makefile, then you can use make to build docs, which in turn uses the Sphinx tool sphinx-build. You can pass the -w <file> option to sphinx-build to write warnings and errors to a file as well as stderr.

Note that options passed through the command line override any other options set in the makefile and conf.py.

Answer 2

sphinx.build_main() calls sphinx.cmdline.main(), which in turn creates a sphinx.application.Sphinx object. You could create such an object directly (instead of "making system calls within python"). Use something like this:

import os
from sphinx.application import Sphinx

# Main arguments 
srcdir = "/path/to/source"
confdir = srcdir
builddir = os.path.join(srcdir, "_build")
doctreedir = os.path.join(builddir, "doctrees")
builder = "html"

# Write warning messages to a file (instead of stderr)
warning = open("/path/to/warnings.txt", "w")

# Create the Sphinx application object
app = Sphinx(srcdir, confdir, builddir, doctreedir, builder, 
             warning=warning)

# Run the build
app.build()