$ apt-get install python3-sphinx
If it not already present, this will install Python for you.
RHEL, CentOS¶
Install python-sphinx using yum:
$ yum install python-sphinx
If it not already present, this will install Python for you.
Other distributions¶
Most Linux distributions have Sphinx in their package repositories.  Usually
the package is called python3-sphinx, python-sphinx or sphinx.  Be
aware that there are at least two other packages with sphinx in their name:
a speech recognition toolkit (CMU Sphinx) and a full-text search database
(Sphinx search).
macOS¶
Sphinx can be installed using Homebrew, MacPorts, or as part of
a Python distribution such as Anaconda.
Homebrew¶
$ brew install sphinx-doc
For more information, refer to the package overview.
MacPorts¶
Install either python3x-sphinx using port:
$ sudo port install py39-sphinx
To set up the executable paths, use the port select command:
$ sudo port select --set python python39
$ sudo port select --set sphinx py39-sphinx
For more information, refer to the package overview.
Anaconda¶
$ conda install sphinx
You would need to install Chocolatey
before running this.
For more information, refer to the chocolatey page.
Other Methods¶
Most Windows users do not have Python installed by default, so we begin with
the installation of Python itself.  To check if you already have Python
installed, open the Command Prompt (⊞Win-r and type cmd).
Once the command prompt is open, type python --version and press
Enter.  If Python is installed, you will see the version of Python printed to
the screen.  If you do not have Python installed, refer to the Hitchhikers
Guide to Python’s Python on Windows installation guides. You must install
Python 3.
Once Python is installed, you can install Sphinx using pip.  Refer
to the pip installation instructions below for more
information.
Installation from PyPI¶
Sphinx packages are published on the Python Package Index.  The preferred tool for installing
packages from PyPI is pip.  This tool is provided with all modern
versions of Python.
On Linux or MacOS, you should open your terminal and run the following command.
$ pip install -U sphinx
On Windows, you should open Command Prompt (⊞Win-r and type
cmd) and run the same command.
C:\> pip install -U sphinx
After installation, type sphinx-build --version on the command
prompt.  If everything worked fine, you will see the version number for the
Sphinx package you just installed.
Installation from PyPI also allows you to install the latest development
release.  You will not generally need (or want) to do this, but it can be
useful if you see a possible bug in the latest stable release.  To do this, use
the --pre flag.
$ pip install -U --pre sphinx
Using virtual environments¶
When installing Sphinx using pip,
it is highly recommended to use virtual environments,
which isolate the installed packages from the system packages,
thus removing the need to use administrator privileges.
To create a virtual environment in the .venv directory,
use the following command.
$ python -m venv .venv
See also
venv – creating virtual environments
Warning
Note that in some Linux distributions, such as Debian and Ubuntu,
this might require an extra installation step as follows.
$ apt-get install python3-venv
Docker¶
Docker images for Sphinx are published on the Docker Hub.  There are two kind
of images:
sphinxdoc/sphinx
sphinxdoc/sphinx-latexpdf
Former one is used for standard usage of Sphinx, and latter one is mainly used for
PDF builds using LaTeX.  Please choose one for your purpose.
sphinxdoc/sphinx-latexpdf contains TeXLive packages. So the image is very large
(over 2GB!).
When using docker images, please use docker run command to invoke sphinx
commands.  For example, you can use following command to create a Sphinx
project:
$ docker run -it --rm -v /path/to/document:/docs sphinxdoc/sphinx sphinx-quickstart
And you can use the following command to build HTML document:
$ docker run --rm -v /path/to/document:/docs sphinxdoc/sphinx make html
For more details, please read README file of docker images.
Installation from source¶
You can install Sphinx directly from a clone of the Git repository.  This
can be done either by cloning the repo and installing from the local clone, on
simply installing directly via git.
$ git clone https://github.com/sphinx-doc/sphinx
$ cd sphinx
$ pip install .
$ pip install git+https://github.com/sphinx-doc/sphinx
You can also download a snapshot of the Git repo in either tar.gz or
zip format.  Once downloaded and extracted, these can be installed with
pip as above.