Customizing Sphinx to avoid generating search box

Question

Is there a simple way (i.e., without creating an entirely new theme) to customize Sphinx so that it generates HTML pages without the search box?

Answer 1

An alternative, which I discovered reading the alabaster theme documentation is to explicitly list which (if any sidebars) are desired in the conf.py file. For example, including this fragment in conf.py:

html_theme = 'alabaster'
html_sidebars = {
    '**': [
        'about.html',
        'navigation.html',
        'searchbox.html',
    ]
}

produces the searchbox; removing searchbox.html from that list and then building produces the same page but without the box. (More information can be found at the Sphinx documentation for the build-configuration file.)