Breathe

This is an extension to reStructuredText and Sphinx to be able to read and render the Doxygen xml output.

Download

Breathe is available from github and PyPI, the Python Package Index. It can be installed with:

pip install breathe

Documentation

The documentation is available here. Thank you to the people running Read the Docs for such an excellent service.

The source for the documentation is in the documentation folder if you want to built it and read it locally.

Note

Breathe does not always get the attention it deserves but I am keen to keep it moving forward. If you report an issue, please keep reminding me about it until it is fixed. I should be better at this but in silence I tend to move to other things so keep reminding me.

Testing

The testsuite can be run with:

make dev-test

The documentation also does a good effort of covering the available functionality with different examples. To build the documentation, run:

make

This will run doxygen over the example code and then run the Breathe documentation. View the results at:

documentation/build/html/index.html

Further to this if you want to compare the current documentation output against a previous state in order to check for regressions there is a compare script in the documentation folder. It takes two arguments which are two commit references that you'd like to compare. This means that all your changes have to be committed first. Also the script does not resolve state dependent references like HEAD so provide concrete commit references like sha1s or branch names. A typical example is to compare your current branch output to master:

# Make sure all your changes are committed first
cd documentation
./compare master my-branch

This will do a checkout and build at each commit and then run meld against the resulting directories so you can see the differences introduced by your branch.

Requirements

Development is currently done with:

• Python 2.7
• Docutils 0.11
• Sphinx 1.7.5
• Doxygen 1.8.4

Doxygen 1.5.1 seems to produce xml with repeated sections which causes Breathe some confusion. Not sure when this was resolved but it might be best to go for the latest possible.

Mailing List Archives

The archive for the Google groups list can be found here.

The previous mailing list was on librelist.com and the archives are available here.

Please post new questions as GitHub issues.

Examples

Examples of Breathe used by other projects:

• fmt
• Lasso C API [pdf]

If you have an example you would like listed here, please make a github issue with the details.

Alternatives

Breathe is not the only solution to this problem. These are the alternatives that we know about. We are very happy to list others if you'd like to provide a link in a GitHub issue.

• Gasp
• Robin
• sphinxcontrib-autodoc_doxygen

Release

Command for releasing source bundle & wheel to PyPI:

python setup.py sdist bdist_wheel upload

Credits

Breathe is maintained by michaeljones & vitaut with contributions from:

• nijel
• sebastianschaetz
• mbolivar
• queezythegreat
• abingham
• davidm
• hobu
• magro11
• scopatz
• vonj
• jmnas
• donkopotamus
• jo3w4rd
• Anthony Truchet
• Daniel Matz
• Andrew Hundt
• sebastinas
• robo9k
• sieben
• rweickelt
• sam-roth
• bnewbold
• serge-sans-paille
• dean0x7d
• Andne
• Tiwalun
• eric-wieser
• olitheolix

Thanks to:

• Dimitri van Heesch for Doxygen.
• Georg Brandl for Sphinx.
• David Goodger for Docutils and reStructuredText.

Change Log

Inspired by Keepachangelog.com.

• 2018-08-07 - Breathe v4.10.0
  • Explicitly use Sphinx 1.7.5 for CI and dev. #385
  • Print filename when printing ParserException. #390
• 2018-06-03 - Breathe v4.9.1
  • Don't append separator for paragraph type. #382
• 2018-06-01 - Breathe v4.9.0
  • Render newlines as separate paragraphs. #380
• 2018-05-26 - Breathe v4.8.0
  • Add quiet option to apidoc. #375
  • Add PHP domain. #351
  • Keep templates on adjacent lines. #300
  • Show reference qualification for methods. #332
  • Adapt tests/CI to newest Sphinx version. #377
  • More robust name regex in renderer. #370
  • Show base classes using Sphinx's cpp domain. #295
  • Fix domain detection when rendering groups. #365
  • Return parallel_{read,write}_safe true for Sphinx's -j. #376
• 2017-10-09 - Breathe v4.7.3
  • Support for enums in the cpp domain.
  • Handle case where compoundref does not have a refid value associated.
• 2017-08-15 - Breathe v4.7.2
  • Fix issue with packaging on Python 2.7 with wheels.
• 2017-08-13 - Breathe v4.7.1
  • Fixed bug regarding code snippets inside Doxygen comments.
• 2017-08-09 - Breathe v4.7.0
  • New outtypes option to prevent documenting namespace and files
  • New boolean breathe_show_define_initializer option specifying whether value of macros should be displayed.
  • New boolean breathe_use_project_refids option controlling whether the refids generated by breathe for doxygen elements contain the project name or not.
  • Fixed
    • Support for Sphinx 1.6
• 2017-02-25 - Breathe v4.6.0
  • Support for the Interface directive
  • Display the contents of defines
• 2017-02-12 - Breathe v4.5.0
  • Improve handling of c typedefs
  • Support new desc_signature_line node
  • Add --project flag to breathe-apidoc helper
  • Dropped testing for Python 3.3 and added 3.6
• 2016-11-13 - Breathe v4.4.0
  • Improve single line parameter documentation rendering
• 2016-11-05 - Breathe v4.3.1
  • Version bump package confusion with wheel release
• 2016-11-05 - Breathe v4.3.0
  • Rewritten rendering approach to use the visitor pattern
  • Dropped support for 2.6 & added testing for 3.5
  • Fixed
    • Issue with running breathe-apidoc for the first time.
    • Improved handling of qualifiers, eg. const & volatile.
    • Supports functions in structs
    • Supports auto-doxygen code path on Windows
• 2016-03-19 - Breathe v4.2.0
  • Added
    • Output links to a class' parents & children.
    • Support for Sphinx's needs_extensions config option.
    • breathe-apidoc script for generating ReStructuredText stub files with Breathe directives from doxygen xml files.
  • Fixed
    • Handling default values in parameter declarations
    • Output order not being reproducible due to iteration over Set.
    • Handling of multiple pointers and references
    • SEVERE: Duplicate ID warnings when using function overloads.
    • Use project name for link references when using default project. So we use the project name instead of 'project0'.
• 2015-08-27 - Breathe v4.1.0
  • Added
    • breathe_doxygen_config_options config variable which allows for adding more config lines to the doxygen file used for the auto-directives.
  • Fixed
    • Display of array & array reference parameters for functions.
    • Handling of links to classes with template arguments.
    • Handling of unnamed enums in C.
    • Naming of template parameter section.
    • Finding functions that are within groups.
    • Rendering of 'typename' and 'class' keywords for templates.
• 2015-04-02 - Breathe v4.0.0
  • Significant work on the code base with miminal reStructureText interface changes. To be documented.
• 2014-11-09 - Breathe v3.2.0
  • Nothing Added, Deprecated or Removed
  • Fixed
    • Changed docutils/Sphinx node usage to fix latex/pdf output.
    • When checking for path separators check for both / and \ regardless of the platform.
    • KeyError when using auto directives without specifying the :project: option even though the default project config setting was set.
    • Use of doxygenfunction no longer inappropriately triggers the duplicate target check and fails to output link targets.
    • Support for inline urls in the doxygen comments.
    • Support for array notation in function parameters.
    • Reduced intention by changing section-defs to use container & rubric nodes rather than desc nodes with signatures & content. Now headings like 'Public Functions' appear inline with their subject matter.
• 2014-09-07 - Breathe v3.1.0
  • Nothing Deprecated or Removed
  • Added
    • The doxygenclass directive can now reference template specialisations by specifying the specialisation in the argument name.
  • Fixed
    • Displaying function parameters for Qt slots output. Previously they were missing even though Qt Slots are essentially just functions.
    • Displaying headings from doxygen comments as emphasized text.
    • Crash when generating warning about being unable to find a define, variable, enum, typedef or union.
    • Only output the definition name for a function parameter if the declartion name is not available. Previously, where they were both available we were getting two names next to each other for no good reason.
• 2014-08-04 - Breathe v3.0.0
  • Improve output of const, volatile, virtual and pure-virtual keywords.
  • Fix css class output for HTML so that object types rather than names are output as the css classes. eg. 'function' instead of 'myFunction'.
  • Fix issue with Breathe getting confused over functions appearing in header and implementation files.
  • Improve matching for overloaded functions when using doxygenfunction directive. Also, provide a list of potential matches when no match is found.
  • Improved :members: implementation to handle inner classes properly.
  • Updated doxygenstruct to share the doxygenclass implementation path which grants it the options from doxygenclass directive.
  • Added :outline: option support to doxygengroup & doxygennamespace directives.
  • Added doxygennamespace directive.
  • Added :undoc-members: option to doxygenclass & doxygengroup directives.
  • Breaking change: Removed :sections: option for doxygenclass & doxygengroup directives and replaced it with :members:, :protected-members: and :private-members:, and changed breathe_default_sections config variable to breathe_default_members. This is designed to more closely match the Sphinx autodoc functionality and interface.
• 2014-06-15 - Breathe v2.0.0
  • Add compare script for checking changes to documentation caused by changes in the implementation.
  • Switched to https reference for MathJax Javascript.
  • Breaking change: Change autodoxygen* directives to require explicitly declared source files in the conf.py rather than attempting to detect them from the directive arguments.
  • Switch documentation hosting to ReadTheDocs.org.
  • Breaking change: Switch to assuming all relative paths are relative to the directory holding the conf.py file. Previously, it would assume they were relative to the user's current working directory. This breaks projects which use separate build & source directories.
  • Add doxygenunion directive.
  • Add doxygengroup directive.
  • Add support for lists in the output. They were previously ignored.
  • Updated implementation to use the docutils nodes that Sphinx does where possible.
• Breathe v1.2.0
  • Change log not recorded.