Allow for generic build command (for use with jupyter-book)

[amichuda]

I wanted to see if it was possible to use sphinx-autobuild with building with jupyter-book. As of now it seems that this is possible as the get_builder function runs sphinx explicitly. Would it be possible to have the server watch a sourcedir and outdir but for a generic command (such as jb build)?

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[pradyunsg]

You can add --pre-build "jb build" today, to run that build and pass additional --watch options as well.

As it stands, this is a really thin wrapper over livereload (the Python package). It might make sense for jupyter-book to get a serve command that uses that directly. FWIW, it's even pretty straightforward to write a script that does the right thing, using only livereload.

import subprocess
import livereload

def run():
    subprocess.run(["jupyter-book", "build"])

server = livereload.Server()
server.watch('docs/source', run)

server.serve(root='docs/build/html')

[ashwin153]

I want to use sphinx-autorebuild with sphinx-multiversion, which itself wraps the sphinx-build command to build versioned documentation. Would it be possible to parameterize the currently hard-coded sphinx-build invocation via a command line option (e.g., --build-cmd)?

[chrisjsewell]

Heya, as I note in jupyter-book/jupyter-book#1455:

jupyter-book now has the ability for external packages to "inject" commands in to its CLI, this is for example how jupyter-book toc works (executablebooks/sphinx-external-toc@ec4a439/setup.cfg#L43-L44). By the same mechanism, sphinx-autobuild could inject a jupyter-book serve command, that is customized for jupyter-book