sphinx_lfs_content

Git LFS is a popular method to store large files like e.g. documentation assets in git repositories. Building such documentation on a system without Git LFS will typically result in broken documentation. sphinx_lfs_content is a minimalistic Sphinx extension that ensures that git-lfs is installed and otherwise installs it and fetches LFS content. It is motivated by the lack of LFS support on readthedocs.org.

Installation

The extension can be installed from PyPI using pip:

python -m pip install sphinx_lfs_content

If you use a requirements file to describe the dependencies of your documentation build, simply add sphinx_lfs_content to it.

How to use it

Add the following lines to your conf.py:

# The list of enabled extensions
extensions = [
    "sphinx_lfs_content",
]

# The relative path from conf.py to the git repository root (defaults to ".")
lfs_content_path_to_git_root = ".."

That's all. The extension will check whether the system has git-lfs and download a version from the git-lfs GitHub page, verify its checksum and checkout any LFS content.

The configuration value lfs_content_path_to_git_root needs to be given despite the fact that this information could be retrieved with git rev-parse --show-toplevel in order to make the extension more robust against recent build failures on ReadTheDocs.

Additionally, a configuration value lfs_content_post_commands is available. It accepts a list of strings with commands that will be executed after the git-lfs checkout was performed. This can be used to resolve chicken-egg situations with other setup code.

Restrictions

The extension is very likely to only work on Linux right now, as it does not properly select the git-lfs archive to download.