How to create custom directives in Sphinx

Question

I'm currently documenting a rest API written in Python. All the project's documentation is created using Sphinx, and for the REST API I would like to create some special directives. For instance, let's say I have this resource defined:

@resource("/user/<email>", method="GET")
def user_details (email):
    """ Returns detailed information about a user account.

    :resource GET: /user/<email>
    :query_param a_param: Some kind of query param.
    """
    # Do stuff and return user details

That's basically how the documentation currently looks. I would like to be able to create a directive for Sphinx that formats one or more of those :query_param ...: just like it does with regular :param:.

I have found how to make roles, but they only work inline, not for blocks of data.

How should I go about making this?

Solution

Sphinx can be extended with custom directives via "Sphinx Extensions". That is, you will need to implement a Sphinx extension providing the query_param custom directive, and add this extension to your Sphinx project.

Sphinx documentation provides a tutorial on implementing extensions, in which they implement a custom directive indeed.

Reference:

http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/stable/extensions.html

http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/stable/extdev/index.html#dev-extensions

Comments

[John Szakmeister]

You may want to ask this on the Sphinx Google Group. Someone there might be more capable of answering the question. Off-hand, I'm not sure how documentation blocks are treated. You can certainly create extensions in Sphinx/docutils, but I'm not sure how docstring parsing fits into the Sphinx/docutils model.

[John Szakmeister]

The answer probably involves using a GroupedField in your extension though.