How It Works

The extension subscribes to some events emitted by the Sphinx application. When these events are triggered, our functions are called and they manipulate the doctree and context passed to the template.

Events subscribed

There are 3 main events that this extension subscribes:

  • doctree-resolved

  • html-collect-pages

  • html-page-context

Each one has an specific goal persuading the same objective: make all resources URLs absolutes.

doctree-resolved

After Sphinx has parsed our source files, this event is triggered. Here, we check if the page being rendered is notfound_pagename and in that case, we replace all the URLs for .. image::, .. figure:: and other directives to point the right path.

html-collect-pages

After all HTML pages are collected and this event is emitted, we check for the existence of a 404 page already. If there is one, we do not need to do anything here. If the user has not defined this page, we render the template notfound_template with the context notfound_context.

html-page-context

Immediately before the template is rendered with the context, this event is emitted. At this point, we override:

  • pathto [1] function with our custom one that will generate the proper URLs.

  • toctree [2] key with the same content of the regular toctree but with all the URLs fixed to find the resources from the 404 page.

  • js_tag [3] and css_tag [4] functions with the exact same code but using our own pathto.