Is there a way Automate sphinx-apidoc generation in readthedocs

I'm somewhat new at both these tool sets.

Currently I am running sphinx-apidoc... and then checking in the resulting doc/source/*.rst files so that readthedocs produces more than an empty document.

However; is there a way to have this done automatically during the readthedoc build process?

It would save remembering to build and checkin all the *.rst files in doc/source on the repo.

The correct way of executing an extra command on Read the Docs is using the "Build customization" feature via build.jobs configuration option. See the docs at https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/build-customization.html

You can do the following in your case:

# .readthedocs.yaml
version: 2

build:
  os: ubuntu-22.04
  tools:
    python: 3
  jobs:
    pre_build:
     - sphinx-apidoc ...

Hopefully that works for you!