---
id: furo
version: "2025.12.19"
license: unclear
license_treatment: permissive
maintenance: active
---

# furo — A clean customisable Sphinx documentation theme.

License: permissive · Maintenance: active · Downloads: 3.0M/mo

## What it is and what it does

Furo is a Sphinx theme that replaces the default HTML output styling with a cleaner, more modern design. It depends on Sphinx, beautifulsoup4, sphinx-basic-ng, pygments, and accessible-pygments to render documentation with responsive layouts, customizable color palettes and fonts, and carefully-designed sidebar navigation. The theme is intentionally minimal, prioritizing content over scaffolding, and includes built-in search styling.

You install it into your documentation build environment, set html_theme = "furo" in your Sphinx conf.py, and your HTML output automatically uses the new theme. It's designed to work well across devices and screen sizes, with particular attention to smaller documentation projects where showing the full hierarchy in the sidebar remains manageable.

Use it for:

- Generate professional-looking HTML documentation for Python libraries or frameworks using Sphinx.
- Customize documentation appearance (colors, fonts, logo) without writing custom CSS or theme code.
- Create responsive documentation that displays correctly on mobile devices, tablets, and desktops.
- Build documentation for smaller to medium-sized projects where sidebar navigation of the full hierarchy is practical.
- Replace the default Sphinx theme with a modern, minimal design that emphasizes content readability.

## Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts above — verify before relying.

Furo is a clean, responsive Sphinx theme for generating HTML documentation with minimal visual scaffolding, customizable colors and fonts, and sidebar navigation optimized for smaller documentation sets.

Yes. Furo is production-stable, actively maintained, has no known vulnerabilities, and requires only low-friction dependencies. It's widely used (3.8M monthly downloads, top 5000 PyPI packages) by major projects including pip, urllib3, and Blender. Install it if you use Sphinx and want a cleaner, responsive theme with minimal setup.

## Install

pip install furo
uv add furo
poetry add furo

## Installing furo

Before you install: Low friction: pure Python wheel with five runtime dependencies (beautifulsoup4, sphinx, sphinx-basic-ng, pygments, accessible-pygments). Actively maintained with recent release (238 days ago) and steady commit activity.

License in practice: MIT license (permissive) — you can use, modify, and distribute Furo freely in both open-source and proprietary projects with minimal restrictions.

Quickstart:

pip install furo

Then in your Sphinx conf.py:

html_theme = "furo"

Requires Sphinx to be installed and a Sphinx documentation project already set up.

Verify before relying:

- Whether the theme's responsive design performs well on very large or very small screens beyond typical mobile/desktop ranges.
- Performance characteristics when used with very large documentation sets despite being 'biased for smaller docsets'.

## Package facts

- License: not declared (permissive)
- Python support: supports_current
- Install friction: low
- Maintenance: active
- Downloads: 3.0M/month (top 5,000 on PyPI)
- Known vulnerabilities: none known

## Tags

sphinx documentation theme, responsive sphinx theme, customizable sphinx html theme, sphinx sidebar navigation, clean minimal sphinx theme, sphinx theme with search, sphinx theme for small docs, sphinx-theme, documentation-tools, responsive-design

[View on SkillFed](https://skillfed.io/packages/furo) · [View on PyPI](https://pypi.org/project/furo/)