Breathe
Your technical docs, beautifully integrated
Website • Documentation • Sponsor
Sponsor: If you benefit from using Breathe as a company or an individual, you can financially support the Breathe project with recurring or one off contributions via Open Collective.
Breathe is a Sphinx plugin providing beautifully integrated Doxygen output in your user-facing documentation. It allows you to combine Doxygen’s excellent technical understanding of your code base with the superb long form documentation output of the Sphinx system.
For Packagers
Breathe packages on PyPI are PGP signed for Breathe >= v4.28.0.
Breathe tarballs on GitHub are PGP signed for Breathe >= v4.29.0.
Download
Breathe is available from github and PyPI, the Python Package Index. It can be installed with:
pip install breathe
Documentation
The documentation is available here. Thank you to the people running Read the Docs for such an excellent service.
The source for the documentation is in the documentation folder if you want to built it and read it locally.
Testing
The testsuite can be run with:
make dev-test
The documentation also does a good effort of covering the available functionality with different examples. To build the documentation, run:
make
This will run doxygen over the example code and then run the Breathe documentation. View the results at:
documentation/build/html/index.html
Further to this if you want to compare the current documentation output against a previous state in order to check for regressions there is a compare script in the documentation folder. It takes two arguments which are two commit references that you’d like to compare. This means that all your changes have to be committed first. Also the script does not resolve state dependent references like HEAD so provide concrete commit references like sha1s or branch names. A typical example is to compare your current branch output to master:
# Make sure all your changes are committed first cd documentation ./compare master my-branch
This will do a checkout and build at each commit and then run meld against the resulting directories so you can see the differences introduced by your branch.
Requirements
Breathe requires Python 3.9+, Sphinx 7.2+, and Doxygen 1.9.2+.
Mailing List Archives
The archive for the Google groups list can be found here.
The previous mailing list was on librelist.com and the archives are available here.
Please post new questions as GitHub issues.
Projects Using Breathe
Examples of projects that use Breathe:
Release
Update CHANGELOG.rst and create the git tag (vX.Y.Z).
Push the tag to GitHub.
The create-release.yml workflow will publish the release to PyPI.
Go to https://github.com/breathe-doc/breathe/tags, select the new tag, and click the “Create release from tag” button to publish a GitHub release.
Maintainers
Breathe is currently maintained by vermeeren & jakobandersen and was formerly maintained by michaeljones & vitaut.
See CONTRIBUTORS for the full list.
Acknowledgements
Changelog
See the CHANGELOG.rst
3 maintainers
Release files for breathe 5.0.0
For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.
Source distribution (sdist)
| File | Size | Uploaded | |
|---|---|---|---|
| breathe-5.0.0.tar.gz | 200.6 kB | Details |
Built distribution (wheel)
| File | Interpreter | ABI | Platform | Reset |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| breathe-5.0.0-py3-none-any.whl | Python 3 | none | any | Details |
Total release size: 301.2 kB
Release files / breathe-5.0.0.tar.gz
| Download URL | breathe-5.0.0.tar.gz |
|---|---|
| Size | 200.6 kB |
| Tags | Source |
|
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums |
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|
|
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums |
401b4d9c360eef294ebefa1a601c79e4247e8f93781e9e0019434ef5722c7e4f
|
| Upload date | |
|
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing? |
Yes |
| Uploaded via |
twine/7.0.0 CPython/3.13.14
|
Provenance
Provenance describes where a file came from. On PyPI, provenance is shared via attestations, which provide a verifiable record of the build or publishing details. View details, limitations and caveats.
PyPI Publish Attestation
PyPI verified that this artifact, at this checksum, originated from the publisher listed below.
Signed by GitHub Actions, verified by PyPI on Sep 21, 2026.
Transparency logRelease files / breathe-5.0.0-py3-none-any.whl
| Download URL | breathe-5.0.0-py3-none-any.whl |
|---|---|
| Size | 100.6 kB |
| Tags | Python 3 |
|
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums |
b6b8d617f8c481c62971afdf8f01af0c865acd29058235dd6e9d241ed2a2f6ae
|
|
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums |
19bd5ea942775ba2e3ab47437f75f7953cdc6f55026c4c2941d523cc490f4272
|
| Upload date | |
|
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing? |
Yes |
| Uploaded via |
twine/7.0.0 CPython/3.13.14
|
Provenance
Provenance describes where a file came from. On PyPI, provenance is shared via attestations, which provide a verifiable record of the build or publishing details. View details, limitations and caveats.
PyPI Publish Attestation
PyPI verified that this artifact, at this checksum, originated from the publisher listed below.
Signed by GitHub Actions, verified by PyPI on Sep 21, 2026.
Transparency log
