“Edit on GitHub” links

Documenteer’s documenteer.ext.githubeditlink extension resolves the in-repository path that pydata-sphinx-theme’s “Edit on GitHub” button links to. It determines where the Sphinx source directory sits inside the Git working tree and publishes that path as the doc_path value in the HTML context.

In the user-guide preset the link is not rendered in the theme’s default position in the right sidebar; instead it appears in the “Help improve this page” box at the bottom of each page, below the previous/next page links, alongside the Git-derived last-modified timestamp. Individual pages can hide the box with the hide_content_footer metadata field.

Tip

If you use Documenteer’s user-guide configuration preset, this extension is already enabled and the link is shown by default. Toggle it with the show_github_edit_link setting in documenteer.toml; you don’t need to edit conf.py.

How the edit URL is built

pydata-sphinx-theme assembles the edit URL from several HTML context values:

{github_url}/{github_user}/{github_repo}/edit/{github_version}/{doc_path}{file_name}

The user-guide preset fills in github_user, github_repo, and github_version from the project.github_url and project.github_default_branch settings in documenteer.toml.

file_name is supplied by the theme as the page’s document name plus its source suffix — for example index.rst. That name is relative to the Sphinx source directory, so doc_path has to be the source directory’s own path within the Git working tree for the two halves to join into a real file path. This extension computes that path.

Why an extension rather than conf.py

The rest of the “Edit on GitHub” context is assembled while conf.py is executed, but doc_path cannot be. At that moment there is no Sphinx application yet, and therefore no source directory to consult; the only path available is the current working directory, which Sphinx sets to the directory holding conf.py — the configuration directory.

For many projects the configuration and source directories are the same, and the distinction doesn’t matter. They differ whenever a build passes -c:

sphinx-build -b html -c . docs _build/html

Here the configuration directory is the repository root while the source directory is docs/. A doc_path taken from the configuration directory would produce a URL that looks plausible but points at a file that doesn’t exist.

This extension therefore computes doc_path from the source directory at Sphinx’s config-inited event — the earliest point where the source directory is known. That is also the safest point at which to switch the button off, because a theme may copy html_theme_options when the builder initializes, and a change made after that copy wouldn’t reach the template.

Overriding the detected path

Auto-detection covers every layout Rubin projects are known to use, but you can set doc_path yourself in conf.py to override it:

conf.py

html_context["doc_path"] = "docs"

When doc_path is already set, the extension uses that value and doesn’t consult Git at all. The button therefore keeps working outside a Git checkout — supplying the path answers the question that auto-detection would have used the working tree to answer.

This is the escape hatch for source layouts that a path within the working tree can’t describe, such as a generated source directory, or documentation published from a different repository than the one being built.

Builds outside a Git checkout

The path can only be derived from a Git working tree. When the source directory isn’t inside one — an sdist, a vendored documentation tree, or a Docker image built without the .git directory — the extension omits the “Edit on GitHub” button from every page and notes this in the build log at the informational level.

The message is deliberately not a warning: building outside a checkout is legitimate, and a warning would fail any build run with -W (which turns warnings into errors).

Note

This extension stays quiet, but it isn’t the only part of the user-guide stack that reads Git. The preset also loads sphinx-last-updated-by-git (through sphinx-sitemap), which does warn when it can’t read the history:

WARNING: Error getting data from Git (no "last updated" dates will be shown
for source files from …): fatal: not a git repository [git.subprocess_error]

A project that builds with -W outside a Git checkout therefore needs to suppress that warning as well:

conf.py

suppress_warnings = ["git.subprocess_error"]

Without -W the warning is harmless and the build succeeds either way.

Reference

The user-guide configuration preset enables this extension automatically. To use it in a standalone Sphinx project, add "documenteer.ext.githubeditlink" to the extensions list in conf.py and provide the repository context that pydata-sphinx-theme expects:

conf.py

extensions = ["documenteer.ext.githubeditlink", ...]

html_theme = "pydata_sphinx_theme"
html_theme_options = {
    "use_edit_page_button": True,
}
html_context = {
    "github_user": "lsst-sqre",
    "github_repo": "documenteer",
    "github_version": "main",
}

The extension fills in doc_path itself, so you don’t need to provide it — but it honors the value if you do (see Overriding the detected path). It takes no configuration of its own, and is inert unless use_edit_page_button is enabled.