Ignore some modules in autodoc

Question

I'm trying to use autodoc for selected modules only. I've created a file which includes:

.. automodule:: some.specific.module
   :members:

And it gets generated correctly. Unfortunately autodoc keeps trying to parse other files too (and fails because of import errors). I know I can mock out some modules, but I want a better solution - stop sphinx from looking at them to begin with.

How can I make sure only the requested module is loaded, and not (for example) test.other.module.

Does http://stackoverflow.com/a/21449475/344286 do what you want? If so I'll post it as an answer — Wayne Werner, Dec 31 '15 at 16:44

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 05 '16 at 05:10

So it turned out to be a stupid mistake. Since some tools generate a scaffold for api documentation sources, those files were left laying around and triggered bad imports.

How this was found:

sphinx has multiple levels of debug logging which do not normally get activated
you can see which lines trigger imports by debug output like

 [autodoc] /path/to/the/doc.rst:158: input:
 .. automodule:: app.module.name
    :members:

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 26 '15 at 16:40

I am seeing three possible causes for this to happen:

Sphinx's cache is causing trouble, and make clean would solve the issue
Your module is located in a package, and the package's __init__.py file is importing these "other files" (or to be more accurate is trying to import them);
These "other files" are imported because you have set PYTHONSTARTUP

Ignore some modules in autodoc

2 Answers2