Quick start¶

Nefertiti for Sphinx can be setup and running in a blink of an eye. Follow this quick start guide to go through the minimal steps to use it with your project.

Note

This page assumes that you want to try Nefertiti on an already existing Sphinx project.

In a blink of an eye¶

Install the package from PyPI:

pip install sphinx-nefertiti

Edit the conf.py file in your documentation directory and change your html_theme setting:

html_theme = "sphinx_nefertiti"

Now rebuild the docs and serve them to get a first glimpse of your site made up with Nefertiti.

Within the directory of your conf.py file:

make clean
make html
python -m http.server -d build/html

Visit http://localhost:8000.

Customize the theme¶

The following features of Nefertiti for Sphinx can be customized:

Fonts
Header links
Localization widget
Color set: blue, indigo, purple, pink, red, …
Pygments styles for light and dark color schemes
Repository name and URL to display it in the header
Project version dropdown selector
Footer links

1. Fonts¶

There are 5 options related to font face customization and 2 options related to font size.

The font face options are:

sans_serif_font: Default site font, defaults to Nunito.
monospace_font: Default monospace font, for code blocks, defaults to Red Hat Mono.
project_name_font: The font for the Project’s name. sans_serif_font otherwise.
documentation_font: reStructuredText and Markdown content. sans_serif_font otherwise.
doc_headers_font: To render documentation headers. documentation_font otherwise.

And the font size options:

monospace_font_size: The CSS font-size for the monospace_font. ie: "1rem".
documentation_font_size: The CSS font-size for the documentation_font. ie: "1.1rem".

Edit your conf.py file and add or modify your html_theme_options setting with the following content. By the way, the fonts referred to in this example are part of the Nefertiti for Sphinx distribution. If you want to use other Open Source licensed fonts read the section “How to add more fonts” to include them with your project.

html_theme_options = {
    "sans_serif_font": "Mulish",
    "monospace_font": "Ubuntu Sans Mono",
    "monospace_font_size": "1.1rem",
    "project_name_font": "Montserrat",
    "documentation_font": "Assistant",
    "documentation_font_size": "1.1rem",
    "doc_headers_font": "Georgia",
}

Read more about customizing the fonts in Customization > Fonts.

2. Header links¶

Add links to the header of your Sphinx project using header links. They can be mere links or dropdown lists. The value given to the link can be either an URL or a documentation link in reStructuredText or Markdown. The user will see an underline below the HTML link whenever it corresponds to the page loaded in the browser.

Header links can be displayed in a second row in the header.

The following content will produced the header of the image below:

html_theme_options = {
    # ... other options ...
    "header_links_in_2nd_row": True,
    "header_links": [
        {
            'text': 'Features',
            'link': '/features.html',
        },
        {
            "text": "Learn",
            "dropdown": (
                {
                    "text": "Learn",
                    "link": "learn/index",
                }, {
                    "text": "Python Types Intro",
                    "link": "python-types",
                }, {
                    "text": "Concurrency and async/await",
                    "link": "async",
                }, {
                    "divider": True,
                }, {
                    "text": "Tutorial - User Guide",
                    "link": "tutorial/index",
                    "match": "^/tutorial/*",
                }, {
                    "text": "Advanced User Guide",
                    "link": "advanced/index",
                    "match": "^/advanced/*"
                }
            )
        },
        {
            'text': 'Release Notes',
            'link': 'release-notes',
        },
        {
            'text': 'Blog',
            'link': 'https://example.com/blog',
        },
    ]
}

Header links can be displayed in the second row of the header. — Read more about customizing the header links in Customization > Header links.¶

3. Localization widget¶

If your project is available in different languages, Nefertiti for Sphinx can display a dropdown in the header to switch between them.

Enable the localization widget by including the locales entry in your html_theme_options setting:

html_theme_options = {
    # ... other options ...
    "locales": [
        ("de", "http://sample-project.org/de/"),
        ("en", "http://sample-project.org/en/"),
        ("es", "http://sample-project.org/es/"),
    ]
}

Read more about customizing this widget in Localization.

4. Colorsets¶

Another customizable feature of the theme is the colorset. In the header of this documentation you can see a dropdown with a palette icon. The colors listed in the dropdown represent the available color sets. Try them to apply the selected color set to this documentation.

To customize the color set in your project add an entry style to the html_theme_options setting in your conf.py module:

html_theme_options = {
    # ... other options ...
    "style": "pink",
}

When style is not given the theme defaults to default, which is cyan.

Another available setting is style_header_neutral, that when is set to True, makes the header color to adapt to the light or dark color-scheme setting. To test it here, use the colorset dropdown at the top right side of the header.

Read more about customizing the base color in Customization > Colorsets.

5. Pygments styles¶

Pygments is the package that renders code blocks. Sphinx supports two settings related with pygments:

pygments_light_style, applied when browser’s prefers-color-scheme returns light.
pygments_dark_style, applied when browser’s prefers-color-scheme returns dark.

Nefertiti for Sphinx extends the use of these settings in a way that their styling is applied when the user selects the scheme in the light/dark dropdown, at the right side of the header.

If your Sphinx project has code-blocks, try changing the pygments style settings and see how they are applied when switching between light and dark schemes in the header. To customize Pygments in your Sphinx project add both entries, pygments_light_style and pygments_dark_style, to the html_theme_options setting in your conf.py module:

html_theme_options = {
    # ... other options ...
    'pygments_light_style': 'solarized-light',
    'pygments_dark_style': 'solarized-dark'
}

See more code blocks rendered with Pygments in the Components > Code blocks page. You can read more about customizing pygments in Customization > Pygments.

6. Repository data¶

If your Sphinx project is about a source code product, and it resides in a Git repository, in GitHub or GitLab, Nefertiti can display information relative to your repository in the header.

Just add the repository_name and repository_url keys to your html_theme_options setting:

html_theme_options = {
    # ... other options ...
    "repository_name": "danirus/sphinx-nefertiti",
    "repository_url": "https://github.com/danirus/sphinx-nefertiti",
}

Read more about customizing the repository widget in Customization > Git repository.

7. Version dropdown¶

If your project is available in different versions Nefertiti for Sphinx can display a dropdown in the header to switch between them.

If you host different versions in different URLs, like:

Version	URL
v2.9.9	https://sample-project.org/latest/
v2.8.5	https://sample-project.org/2.8.5/
v2.7.2	https://sample-project.org/2.7.2/

Enable the version dropdown by adding the versions key to your html_theme_options setting:

html_theme_options = {
    # ... other options ...
    "versions": [
        ("v2.9.9", "https://sample-project.org/latest/"),
        ("v2.8.5", "https://sample-project.org/2.8.5/"),
        ("v2.7.2", "https://sample-project.org/2.7.2/"),
    ]
}

Read more about customizing this widget in Customization > Version dropdown.

8. Footer links¶

In addition to the copyright notice, configurable with the copyright Sphinx setting, you can add links that are important to your project, like a link to your company website or a link to your code repository. Footer links are added via the footer_links key in the html_theme_options. This entry has to be a list of dictionaries.

As an example, the 4 links of the current Nefertiti for Sphinx documentation look like this in the html_theme_options setting:

html_theme_options = {
    # ... other options ...
    "footer_links": [
        {
            "text": "Documentation",
            "link": "https://sphinx-nefertiti.readthedocs.com",
        }, {
            "text": "Package",
            "link": "https://pypi.com/sphinx-nefertiti",
        }, {
            "text": "Repository",
            "link": "https://github.com/danirus/sphinx-nefertiti",
        }, {
            "text": "Issues",
            "link": "https://github.com/danirus/sphinx-nefertiti/issues",
        }
    ]
}

In addition you can remove the Built with Sphinx and Nefertiti notice by setting the show_powered_by key to False. It is True by default:

html_theme_options = {
    # ... other options ...
    "show_powered_by": False
}

Custom CSS¶

Apart from the options explained in the previous sections you can apply additional style changes to your site customizing the CSS variables provided with Nefertiti for Sphinx. As an example, let’s create a custom.css file and customize one of such variables.

From the directory of your conf.py file, create a new directory static if it does not exist yet, and add a file called custom.css to it:

mkdir static
touch static/custom.css

Add the following example CSS code to custom.css:

:root {
  --nftt-body-font-weight: 400;
  --nftt-pre-line-height: 135%;
}

.light {
  --nftt-headings-color: darkblue;
}

.dark {
  --nftt-headings-color: lightblue;
}

The result of those changes are:

--nftt-body-font-weight: 400; will change the font-weight CSS property applied to the <body> of the HTML page.
--nftt-pre-line-height: 135%; will change the line-height CSS property for <pre> elements, like code blocks.
--nftt-headings-color will change the color used for the headings of your documents.

What are ‘:root’, ‘.light’ and ‘.dark’?

Some of Nefertiti’s CSS variables are defined within the selectors .light and .dark. To override such CSS variables they have to be defined with at least the same level of specifity and loaded in the page after Nefertiti’s stylesheet.

Other CSS variables, like --nftt-pre-line-height, can be simply added to the :root pseudo selector because their values do not change with the color scheme.

To load your custom.css styles after Nefertiti’s stylesheet Sphinx provides the option html_css_files in conf.py.

Now edit your conf.py and update the html_css_files entry so that it includes your custom.css file with higher priority than sphinx-nefertiti’s stylesheet:

html_css_files = ["custom.css",]

And continue to the next section to rebuild your Sphinx site.

Rebuild your site¶

With all the previous changes in place, save the content, clean up the build directory, build it and serve it again:

$ make clean && make html
$ python -m http.server -d build/html

Visit http://localhost:8000 to take a look at the changes.