Sphinx Mounts

Mount external source trees into a Sphinx build without copying or symlinking. Sources stay where they live — for example, a Bazel bazel-bin/ output tree, a sibling repository, or a generated cache directory — and are made visible to Sphinx at a configured docname prefix. RST works out of the box; Markdown works as soon as myst-parser is loaded in the host project; any other format a Sphinx parser extension registers is picked up the same way.

Features

• No materialization: sources are read directly from their original location. No copy, no symlink, no staging step.
• Declarative TOML config: the mount mapping lives in ubproject.toml (or any TOML file you name via sources_from_toml). conf.py only references it.
• Language-agnostic & toolable: because the config is static TOML, IDE plugins, language servers, indexers, and build-system integrations written in any language can read the same mount mapping that sphinx-build reads — without having to evaluate conf.py.
• Variant-gated source selection: sphinx-mounts is also the Sphinx-side reader for the shared ubproject.toml keys that decide which files are in the build for the current variant — [[source.variant_sources]], which narrows a file set by glob, and if on a [[source.mounts]] entry, which gates a whole mounted bundle. A project with no mounts at all can install it purely for the first, to have sphinx-build narrow its document set the way ubCode already does.
• Toctree auto-wiring: an optional attach_to per mount injects the bundle's entry doc into a host toctree at build time, so the host stays buildable when a mount is absent (a developer hasn't run the upstream build, CI hasn't fetched the bundle).
• Self-contained bundles: each mount is intended to be a self-contained tree of .rst files with relative links only, so it can be reused across host projects. A linter is on the roadmap; the convention is not currently enforced.

Quick Start

pip install sphinx-mounts

Add to your conf.py:

extensions = ["sphinx_mounts"]

Describe your mounts in ubproject.toml next to conf.py:

[[source.mounts]]
dir = "/abs/path/to/bazel-bin/docs/api-foo"
mount_at = "_generated/api-foo"

Reference mounted documents from your host project just like any other doc:

.. toctree::

   _generated/api-foo/index

Why TOML?

A conf.py is executable Python — only a Python interpreter can read it correctly. A TOML file is static data, parseable by every common language. Putting the mount mapping in ubproject.toml means that any external tool (an IDE extension, a documentation indexer, a CI gate, a non-Python build system) can resolve cross-references without running Sphinx. The same file can also carry sections owned by sibling tools such as Sphinx-Needs ([needs]) and sphinx-codelinks ([codelinks]), keeping the project's documentation configuration in one place.

If TOML isn't an option for your setup, the legacy mounts = [...] list in conf.py is still honored as a fallback — see the docs for details.

Related projects

• bazel-drives-sphinx — a heavier take on Bazel-driven Sphinx documentation: Bazel rules declare every RST file (and needs.json artifact) as a label, and generated per-project targets invoke sphinx-build on the assembled tree. sphinx-mounts is the lightweight alternative — Bazel drops generated files under bazel-bin/, the extension mounts that directory, and Sphinx reads in place. Pick the former for fine-grained multi-project rule collection and tag-driven variants; pick the latter when "Bazel build, then Sphinx" is enough. See docs/source/bazel.rst for a side-by-side comparison.

Documentation

See docs/source/ for the full configuration reference and the Bazel integration walkthrough. The "Related projects" section in docs/source/index.rst lists sibling tools (Sphinx-Needs, sphinx-codelinks, ubCode, bazel-drives-sphinx) that share the ubproject.toml convention.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.