Including dynamic content in documentation generated by Python Sphinx

Question

I am using Sphinx to generate documentation for my project, and building the documentation as part of the product's install process.

I would like to dynamically include the hostname in the text and/or code-blocks. I have not seen any explanations in the documentation nor any facility for including the output of a shell command or anything other than specific line(s) from a specific file. Does this functionality exist?

Answer 1

Here are two Sphinx extensions that can do this:

• autorun: executes Python code in runblock directives, captures the output and inserts it into documents.
• programoutput: executes arbitrary commands using the program-output directive and inserts the output into documents.