Modify Sphinx TOC tree

Question

I have a Sphinx project with a TOC (index.rst) that includes :maxdepth: 2. The problem is I want to reduce the depth to 1 for the release section so that it doesn't include the list of release notes in the main TOC (the list is too long).

It seems that the TOC list can be modified using a doctree-resolved event handler, but I can't figure out how to modify the TOC tree in the event handler:

from sphinx import addnodes

def setup(app):
    def update_toctree(app, doctree, docname):
        if docname != 'index':
            return

        node = doctree.traverse(addnodes.toctree)[0]
        toc = app.env.resolve_toctree(docname, app.builder, node)

        # do something with "toc" here

    app.connect('doctree-resolved', update_toctree)

Answer 1

Perhaps not an ideal solution, but I've done something like this before using multiple toctree entries on the same page, something like:

####################
Presto Documentation
####################

.. toctree::
    :maxdepth: 2

    overview
    installation

.. toctree::
    :maxdepth: 1

    release

It's not ideal since most themes will add extra padding between the trees, but in my case that was better than having the huge list of nested items for certain pages.