sphinx-build: Add support for "-j auto"

Adjust -j argument so it can accept special keyword "auto", which
will set -j to the number of CPUs on machine.

Change was inspired by headaches while trying to find the best way
to get sphinx-build to use the max number of cores from any machine
we build on (Ubuntu, Mac, AWS Linux, etc). Rather than write
external scripts to set this (sysctl calls, grepping /proc/cpuinfo,
etc), it made more sense to build the functionality into
sphinx-build itself.

Change Summary:
* New custom type in sphinx.cmdline for handling -j argument
* Adjusted help string for -j flag

1 files changed, 16 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/sphinx/cmdline.py b/sphinx/cmdline.py
index 11f1861d8..590aa8b0a 100644
--- a/sphinx/cmdline.py
+++ b/sphinx/cmdline.py
@@ -11,6 +11,7 @@
 from __future__ import print_function
 
 import argparse
+import multiprocessing
 import sys
 import traceback
 from os import path
@@ -83,6 +84,19 @@ def handle_exception(app, args, exception, stderr=sys.stderr):
                   file=stderr)
 
 
+def jobs_argument(value):
+    # type (int, str) -> int
+    """
+    Special type to handle 'auto' flags passed to 'sphinx-build' via -j flag. Can
+    be expanded to handle other special scaling requests, such as setting job count
+    to (cpu_count / 2)
+    """
+    if value == 'auto':
+        return multiprocessing.cpu_count()
+    else:
+        return value
+
+
 def get_parser():
     # type: () -> argparse.ArgumentParser
     parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(
@@ -129,10 +143,9 @@ files can be built by specifying individual filenames.
     group.add_argument('-d', metavar='PATH', dest='doctreedir',
                        help='path for the cached environment and doctree '
                        'files (default: OUTPUTDIR/.doctrees)')
-    group.add_argument('-j', metavar='N', default=1, type=int, dest='jobs',
+    group.add_argument('-j', metavar='N', default=1, type=jobs_argument, dest='jobs',
                        help='build in parallel with N processes where '
-                       'possible')
-
+                       'possible (special value "auto" will set N to number of CPUs')
     group = parser.add_argument_group('build configuration options')
     group.add_argument('-c', metavar='PATH', dest='confdir',
                        help='path where configuration file (conf.py) is '