Sphinx Lens

Structure-aware indexing and precise navigation for Sphinx documentation.

Sphinx knows things about your documentation that nothing downstream gets to use: which text belongs to which section, that django.db.transaction.atomic is a documented object with a canonical name, and where every cross-reference points. Then it renders HTML and throws that away.

Sphinx Lens is a Sphinx builder that writes it down instead. The output is a single SQLite index of documents, sections, and domain objects, each with a stable reference and its own scoped text, plus the compiled link graph between them. Coding agents get to read one precise scope instead of grepping a source tree.

Each scope remains separately addressable. Consumers can retrieve the relevant part of the documentation without loading a whole-site text export or recovering structure from generated HTML.

Quick start

Install Sphinx Lens in the same environment as your documentation and build the index like any other Sphinx artifact:

sphinx-build -b lens docs/ docs/_build/lens/
sphinx-lens locate "connection timeout"
sphinx-lens inspect py:class:example.Client
sphinx-lens read guide/network#timeouts
sphinx-lens links guide/network#timeouts

The lens builder is discovered through Sphinx's builder entry point; no conf.py change is required. It loads the project's formats, extensions, and domains, then writes docs/_build/lens/index.sqlite. Query commands discover that index from the repository root or anywhere inside the Sphinx source tree. Run sphinx-lens build from the repository to discover conf.py and create the index without spelling out the source directory.

Sphinx executes conf.py during every build. Only index projects you trust, and run the command in the project's documentation environment so MyST, autodoc, themes, and project-specific extensions are importable.

Install the bundled agent skill with Library Skills:

uvx library-skills install --skill sphinx-lens --yes

locate is lexical. It finds the right reference so that read and links can do the real work; embedding similarity is out of scope.

Full documentation is at https://mgaitan.github.io/sphinx-lens/. Start with Getting started, or read How it works for why this is a separate artifact rather than a reuse of objects.inv, searchindex.js, or Sphinx doctrees.

Development

• Install dependencies with uv sync.
• New dependency releases are delayed by one week via uv cooldown ([tool.uv].exclude-newer = "1 week"), with per-package overrides when required (for example, ty).
• Make targets and GitHub Actions enable uv's malware check against known malicious-package advisories.
• Install prek as an external tool:

uv tool install prek

• Install git hooks with prek:

prek install

• Run the local QA bundle with prek:

prek run --all-files

• PRs with documentation changes publish a docs preview at:

https://mgaitan.github.io/sphinx-lens/_preview/pr-<PR_NUMBER>/

• Build this project's own index with make lens, and the docs with make docs.