mysterious sphinx error

[rytis-paskauskas]

Guys, never been able to build the docs (but building ESP32 projects with esp-idf goes smoothly, so I guess the installation is OK)
Any help to resolving this issue and pointers towards successfully building the help/manual, will be most appreciated.
Here's the /tmp/sphinx-err-[a-z]*.txt file.

# Sphinx version: 2.3.1
# Python version: 3.9.9 (CPython)
# Docutils version: 0.18.1 release
# Jinja2 version: 3.0.3
# Last messages:

# Loaded extensions:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/me/.espressif/python_env/idf5.0_py3.9_env/lib/python3.9/site-packages/sphinx/cmd/build.py", line 272, in build_main
    app = Sphinx(args.sourcedir, args.confdir, args.outputdir,
  File "/home/me/.espressif/python_env/idf5.0_py3.9_env/lib/python3.9/site-packages/sphinx/application.py", line 257, in __init__
    self.config.setup(self)
  File "/home/me/.espressif/python_env/idf5.0_py3.9_env/lib/python3.9/site-packages/esp_docs/conf_docs.py", line 334, in setup
    app.add_config_value('build_dir', os.environ['BUILDDIR'], 'env')
  File "/usr/lib/python3.9/os.py", line 679, in __getitem__
    raise KeyError(key) from None
KeyError: 'BUILDDIR'

The above is a result of
python -u -m sphinx.cmd.build -j 1 -b html -d /path-to/esp-idf/docs/_build/en/esp32/doctrees -w sphinx-warning-log.txt -t esp32 -D idf_target=esp32 -D docs_to_build= -D config_dir=/path-to/.local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/esp_docs -D doxyfile_dir=/path-to/esp-idf/docs -D project_path=/path-to/esp-idf/path-to/esp-idf/docs/en /path-to/esp-idf/docs/_build/en/esp32/html
which is my translation of build-docs -l en -t esp32, in which I substituted /usr/bin/python with python, the latter being a link to the binaries that the API expects.

[ESP-Marius]

Hi, sorry for the late reply.

build_docs.py injects a environment variable called BUILDDIR, which is missing if you call sphinx directly like this. You can try exporting this before running it. It's the link to the build directory for the docs (the build output), so e.g. path-to/esp-idf/path-to/esp-idf/docs/en /path-to/esp-idf/docs/_build/en/esp32 in your case.

Just curious, any reason why you need to invoke it this way instead of letting build-docs handle it?