Auto-building Sphinx docs

I wrote this post in 2012, more than 12 years ago. It may be very out of date, partially or totally incorrect. I may even no longer agree with this, or might approach things differently if I wrote this post today. I rarely edit posts after writing them, but if I have there'll be a note at the bottom about what I changed and why. If something in this post is actively harmful or dangerous please get in touch and I'll fix it.

Here’s a quick way to automatically regenerate your Sphinx docs as you make changes to the source. There’s probably a million ways to do this; here’s mine:

$ pip install watchdog
$ watchmedo shell-command \
              --patterns="*.txt" \
              --ignore-pattern='_build/*' \
              --recursive \
              --command='make html'