How to force Sphinx to use Python 3.x interpreter

I'm on Ubunut and had the same problem. I won't use Josh_P or Nicolas answer because..

• I don't want to change my PYTHON path.
• I don't want to uninstall python-sphinx because I need it with older Projects.

So i fixed it with this little script called sphinx3-build:

#!/usr/bin/python3
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
"""
Same as /usr/bin/sphinx-build but with different
interpreter
"""

import sys

if __name__ == '__main__':
    from sphinx import main, make_main
    if sys.argv[1:2] == ['-M']:
        sys.exit(make_main(sys.argv))
    else:
        sys.exit(main(sys.argv))

It's the same as sphinx-build but with a different interpreter. In the Makefile I changed the following line:

SPHINXBUILD   = sphinx3-build

Now copy the file to the /usr/bin/ folder:

sudo cp sphinx3-build /usr/bin/

This worked for me. You could also use it locally for one project only by placing the script into the same folder as the Makefile and set SPHINXBUILD to ./sphinx3-build.

I had this exact same problem last night, when I came across your question. — I am also on Arch.

I guess the problem could be a number of different things, but the solution for me was that I had the Python 2 version of the python-distribute package installed and therefore had easy_install-2.7 not easy_install-3.2.

I believe in my case the wrong version of python-distribute was installed by my attempt to previously install Sphinx from pacman (which installs version 1.0.8), so uninstalling Sphinx and all subsequently unneeded dependencies pacman -Rsu python-sphinx and then installing python-distribute got me the right version of easy_install, then reinstalling Sphinx with easy_install and the Sphinx installation works as expected.

If you have other things that depend on python-distribute then the process may be a little different. But start by just trying to remove python-distribute and work from there.

Scrap that last part. It's too early in the morning and I wasn't thinking straight! python2-distribute and python-distribute are seperate packages which I believe can co-exist. So, if this is your problem all you need to do is check you have python-distribute (not "2"), if not install it, and then ensure you use easy_install-3.2 to install Sphinx.

Hope this helps you.

On Ubuntu, python3-sphinx is a separate package. In my case, I needed to install python3-sphinx:

sudo apt-get install python3-sphinx

You can probably run both on a machine, but I just removed the old one:

sudo apt-get remove python-sphinx

My old makefile worked just fine with my Python 3 code after this.

Installation: Install sphinx with pip for python3(pip3 like that).

    pip3 install -U sphinx

Building: Makefile(linux/Mac) changes.

    SPHINXBUILD   = python -msphinx

In above line in Makefile change python to python3(or python3.x) like

   SPHINXBUILD   = python3 -msphinx

if default python is pointing to 2.x version python.