autosummary “toctree contains reference to nonexisting document” warnings

Question

I am facing the same problem as in this thread. When I build my Sphinx documentation with make html then I get a lot of warnings like this

None:None: WARNING: toctree contains reference to nonexisting document u'cars.Car.time_elapsed'

I am using html_theme = 'sphinx_rtd_theme'. If I change it to classic, then I don't get the warnings. If I add numpydoc_show_class_members = False to conf.py, then I don't get them either.

BUT; I really like sphinx_rtd_theme and when I use classic or add numpydoc_show_class_members = False, then a 'TOC' of my Python methods are removed, which I prefer staying (see the red box in the image) .

The documentation of the cars module is made by

.. automodule:: cars
   :members:

The module contains a single class Car with two methods. The docstrings are written in numpydoc.

Answer 1

It seems to me that you are currently using the numpydoc extension. Please note that Numpy and Google style docstrings are now supported by the builtin sphinx.ext.napoleon extension.

Removing the numpydoc extension and using sphinx.ext.napoleon will likely solve your problem.

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Sources

• Napoleon - Marching toward legible docstrings
• Sphinx Doc - Support for NumPy and Google style docstrings