sphinx-autobuild Infinite Loop - any Solution?

[michaelweinold]

I have been using sphinx-autobuild with all our documentation projects. Unfortunately, I can not figure out how to avoid the infinite build loops, which seem to be affecting most users:

Related issues currently:

• Ignore autosummary generated files to detect changes sphinx-autobuild#154
• Interaction with autodoc plugin not working ? sphinx-autobuild#148
• Server perpetually restarts after rebuilding documentation sphinx-autobuild#120
• Use sphinx's exclude_patterns for ignore pattern sphinx-autobuild#131
• Can't use --ignore with doc/_build/jupyter_execute/*.ipynb to prevent infinite loop sphinx-autobuild#117
• Support recursive ** globs in --ignore sphinx-autobuild#112

In our documentation, I am using sphinx-autoapi. The package creates an api folder in our directory structure:

.
└── source/
    ├── conf.py
    ├── index.md
    └── content/
        ├── introduction/
        │   ├── chapter_1.md
        │   └── chapter_2.md
        └── api/
            ├── autogenerated_api_page_1.html
            └── autogenerated_api_page_2.html

But commands like

sphinx-autobuild --ignore=source/content/api source _build/html -j auto --open-browser

don't work. The sphinx-autobuild package just keeps on building the documentation in an infinite loop.

There are two PRs currently open, which might solve all these issues:

• [ENH] Sphinx's exclude_patterns as ignore patterns sphinx-autobuild#135
• Supporting glob-style operations sphinx-autobuild#123

Related issues:

• Ignore contents of .gitignore sphinx-autobuild#140
• Server perpetually restarts after rebuilding documentation sphinx-autobuild#120

Could a package maintainer take a look? Any help would be greatly appreciated!