Dust

Dust is a Sphinx extension that emits warnings when a document hasn't been proofread in a while.

It prevents your doc from accumulating dust!

Setting up

Install dust from pip:

$ pip install sphinx-dust

Then add it as an extension to your project's conf.py:

# conf.py
extensions = [
    'sphinx_dust',
]

Using dust

Dust introduces a new directive: reviewer-meta.

It takes two arguments:

• written-on, the date the document was redacted; and,
• proofread-on, the date the document was proofread.
• dust-days-limit, overrides the global dust_days_limit to customize the day the document can live without review.

Both dates must respect the yyyy-mm-dd format.

Here it is in context:

.. index.rst

Rubik's Cube Tutorial
---------------------

.. reviewer-meta::
    :written-on: 1974-05-19
    :proofread-on: 1974-06-20
    :dust-days-limit: 25

This directive will be replaced by a note reading:

.. note::

    Written on 19 May 1974, proofread on 20 June 1974

Running sphinx-build will output a warning if the number of days spanning between written-on and proofread-on is greater than dust_days_limit. In this case, with dust_days_limit = 30, Sphinx will emit a warning:

/path/to/your/doc/index.rst:2: WARNING: This document hasn't been proofread for 32 days

Using Sphinx's -W option, warnings will be turned into errors, useful to make CI builds fail and be notified of outdated docs.

The warning and note content are exported using sphinx.locale so you can translate them in your language if you see fit.

Configuration

Various parameters can be tweaked to your convenience. You can alter any of them in your project's conf.py file, they're simple Python variables.

You can assign any value to these settings, however you should respect their typing, the extension could crash otherwise.

Here's an exhaustive list of every parameter:

• dust_days_limit (default: 30), the number of days a document can live since its last reviewing without emitting warnings,
• dust_emit_warnings (default: True), controls whether the extension emits a warning when a document needs reviewing,
• dust_include_output (default: True), controls whether to include an HTML output in the monitored documents,
• dust_output_format (default: "Written on {written_on}, proofread on {proofread_on}"), the content of the HTML output, needs to include two format variables: written_on and proofread_on, which will get replaced by the result of strftime-formatting written-on and proofread-on values,
• dust_datetime_format (default: "%d %B %Y"), the format datetimes (written-on and proofread-on values) take in HTML output; and,
• dust_node_classes (default: ['note']), a list of Sphinx admonition classes to apply to the node used to generate HTML.