Sphinx builds your docs into HTML files, so in most cases this docs should be served by your web server rather then Django. However Django is able to serve static files as well.
You can use the django.views.static.serve
function to do this and wrap this function with login_required
. E.g:
from django.views.static import serve
from django.contrib.auth.decorators import login_required
urlpatterns += patterns('',
url(r'^docs/(?P<path>.*)', login_required(serve), {'document_root': '/path/to/sphinx/build/html'}, 'docs'),
)
However this configuration will be considered a bad practice in production environment as in this case Django will serve both html and css/js files from your sphinx theme.
The first improvement you can do here is to serve /path/to/sphinx/build/html/_static/
with apache/nginx or whatever you use.
The more proper way is to serve docs with apache/nginx and make it handle the auth itself. Unfortunately I made a quick Google search but did not find a way to use Django's User model to handle http_auth in apache or other. Alternatively you can use something like mod_sendfile
or X-Accel
modules - http://www.wellfireinteractive.com/blog/nginx-django-x-accel-redirects/ In a nutshell - Django app checks permission if user can view the file and add special header to response containing file path. Webserver will serve this file instead of original message from django