sphinx-build fail - autodoc can't import/find module

Autodoc can't find your modules, because they are not in sys.path.

You have to include the path to your modules in in the sys.path in your conf.py.Look at the top of your conf.py (just after the import of sys), there is a sys.path.insert() statement, which you can adapt.

By the way: you can use the Makefile created by Sphinx to create your documentation.Just call

make

to see the options.

If something went wrong before try:

make clean

before running make html.

solution

It sounds like os.path.append() is working OK for folks, but if you follow the conf.py template, you would insert the module path to the front of sys.path using os.path.insert(0, ...), and just add an extra .

import osimport syssys.path.insert(0, os.path.abspath('..'))

If you have setup your sphinx project to use separate build and source directories, that call should instead be:

sys.path.insert(0, os.path.abspath('../..'))

about sys.path ...

To run python code, the python interpreter needs to know where it is. With the sphinx config being a python script, it's location needs to be made known, which is done by adding it the the sys.path variable using the insert method (see the docs on module search path).

The path added to sys.path in this case is a "relative" path, which is specified using dots. This is a general way of specifying the path, which allows the code to be moved and still point correctly to the correct path in your codebase.

. - current path of the conf.py

.. - parent path of the conf.py

../.. - parent of the parent path, etc.

I use linux, so directories are specified with a forward slash, but a cross-platform method for specifying parent directories can be acheived with pathlib.

from pathlib import Pathparent = Path(__file__).parentparents_parent = Path(__file__).parents[1]

in conf.py

just add the path to your project folder.

sys.path.append('/home/workspace/myproj/myproj')