View your rendered Sphinx or ReStrucutredText documents in a browser

If you’ve ever done much work with Sphinx (or any ReStructuredText) documents, you know how important it is to regularly check how they look when rendered into html. Often, you get your formatting wrong or introduce a syntax error. Constantly running sphinx-build by hand is really annoying.

There is a very nice tool called restview that can be used to view ReStructuredText files, but it doesn’t support all the sphinx keywords and features. Furthermore, it doesn’t render with a style

The sphinx-view application automatically renders the documents using the ‘alabaster’ theme. It renders them using Sphinx itself. It is even capable of rendering an entire directory at once and producing a full html page with navigation between sub-pages. This is very handy if, for instance, you are editing the docs folder of a python project.

In addition, sphinx-view will watch for changes to the documents, rebuild the pages, and refresh the browser any time you save the documents you are viewing.