Installation

Alabaster requires Sphinx 6.2 or newer, and is included as the default theme.

Note

If you distribute your documentation via Read the Docs, you will need to explicitly enable Alabaster by adding this line to your conf.py:

html_theme = 'alabaster'

To set-up Alabaster, add an explicit html_sidebars setting so Alabaster’s customized sidebar templates are loaded:

html_sidebars = {
    '**': [
        'about.html',
        'searchfield.html',
        'navigation.html',
        'relations.html',
        'donate.html',
    ]
}

That’s it! You now have the standard Alabaster theme set up. Read on for more core configuration concerns, or see Customization for feature/style options.

Sidebars

Feel free to adjust html_sidebars as desired - the theme is designed assuming you’ll always have about.html activated, but otherwise it doesn’t care much.

• See the Sphinx docs for details on how this setting behaves.

• Alabaster provides about.html (logo, github button + blurb), donate.html (donation/support buttons/links) and navigation.html (a more flexible version of the builtin localtoc/globaltoc templates). searchfield.html comes with Sphinx itself.

Static path for images and/or custom stylesheet

If you’re using any of the image-related options listed on Customization (logo or touch-icon) or a custom stylesheet, you’ll also want to tell Sphinx where to get these files from. If so, add a line like this (changing the path if necessary; see the Sphinx docs for ‘html_static_path’) to your conf.py:

html_static_path = ['_static']