Get the "last updated" time for each Sphinx page from Git

This is a little Sphinx extension that does exactly that.

It also checks for included files and other dependencies.

If a page doesn't have a source file, its last_updated time is set to None.

If a source file is not tracked by Git (e.g. because it has been auto-generated on demand by autosummary_generate) but its dependencies are, the last_updated time is taken from them. If you don't want this to happen, use git_untracked_check_dependencies = False.

If a source file is not tracked by Git, its HTML page doesn't get a source link. If you do want those pages to have a sourcelink, set git_untracked_show_sourcelink = True. Of course, in this case html_copy_source and html_show_sourcelink must also be True, and the theme you are using must support source links in the first place.

The default value for html_last_updated_fmt is changed from None to the empty string.

By default, timestamps are stored using the local time zone. You can specify a datetime.timezone object (or any tzinfo subclass instance) with the configuration option git_last_updated_timezone. You can also use any string recognized by babel, e.g. git_last_updated_timezone = 'NZ'.

Usage

1. Install the Python package sphinx-last-updated-by-git
2. Add 'sphinx_last_updated_by_git' to extensions in your conf.py
3. Run Sphinx!

Caveats

• When using a "Git shallow clone" (with the --depth option), the "last updated" commit for a long-unchanged file might not have been checked out. In this case, the last_updated time is set to None (and a warning is shown during the build).

  This might happen on https://readthedocs.org/ because they use shallow clones by default. The DONT_SHALLOW_CLONE feature should fix this.

  If you want to get rid of the warning, use this in your conf.py:

  suppress_warnings = ['git.too_shallow']

• The date might not be displayed on https://readthedocs.org/ when using the sphinx_rtd_theme (which is their default). See issue #1.

License

BSD-2-Clause (same as Sphinx itself), for more information take a look at the LICENSE file.

Similar stuff

https://github.com/jdillard/sphinx-gitstamp
https://github.com/OddBloke/sphinx-git
https://github.com/MestreLion/git-tools (git-restore-mtime)
https://github.com/TYPO3-Documentation/sphinxcontrib-gitloginfo