How to add a copy button in the code blocks for RST/Read the Docs

Question

I have been working on a personal "how-to" guide, chronicling and keeping a journal of my studies as I go along.

I now have a, almost too long block of code that, when I've encountered this length of code myself, its always frustrating trying to highlight JUST the block without it highlighting the whole page, or not enough.

So, my question is, for rst (reStructuredText) .. code-block::'s, is there an add-on or a way to add in a copy button, for automatic highlighting or automatically adding the text to the users clipboard? Or would this be a more html-literal type of code I'd have to include in the build and reference it in the code block? If so, what would something like that look like as well?

Answer 1

There is a dedicated package for that called sphinx-copybutton.

It's straightforward to use.

# Install
pip install sphinx-copybutton
# Declare it in the conf.py
extensions = [
    ...
    'sphinx_copybutton'
    ...
]

And that's it, generate the doc and a copy button will appear automatically in each code block.