Edit: As of now (Sphinx 1.4.9) there seems to be no way to tell Sphinx to do what I want (see issue on GitHub). The accepted answer from Brecht Machiels solves the problem in an other way, until Sphinx might be able to do so one day. Description: I am trying to document a Python project with sphinx-apidoc. The Sphinx config is almost default, I just included 'sphinx.ext.autodoc'. It works in general, but derived classes do not inherit method documentation of their superclasses as I would expect it. Example: Consider a very minimalistic Python package called project. Aside an empty __init__.py it only consists of one file (base.py, see below) # -*- coding: utf-8 -* import abc class Superclass(object): """The one to rule them all""" @abc.abstractmethod def give(self, ring): """Give out a ring""" pass class Derived(Superclass): """Somebody has to do the work""" def give(self, ring): print("I pass the ring {} to you".format(ring)) Running sphinx-apidoc (sphinx-apidoc -o apidoc project -f) generates the following files: apidoc/modules.rst project ======= .. toctree:: :maxdepth: 4 project apidoc/project.rst project package =============== Submodules ---------- project.base module ------------------- .. automodule:: project.base :members: :undoc-members: :show-inheritance: Module contents --------------- .. automodule:: project :members: :undoc-members: :show-inheritance: Including apidoc/modules.rst in the default index.rst followed by make html generates a basic html documentation for both classes and their methods. Unfortunately, the docstring of Derived.give is empty. Question: Is there a way to tell Sphinx to take the parent's method documentation without decorator magic as described in this SO post for every single method? Continue reading...
