Is there a way to have sphinx call a script or executable as a pre build task?

Question

I'm trying to stitch together doxygen and sphinx using breathe.

breathe requires you generate doxygen xml output first though: https://breathe.readthedocs.io/en/latest/quickstart.html

I don't want to do this in a separate step. Can I just have sphinx-build execute doxygen for me on build? I just need it to run this command first with some args. Is this possible without having to write a custom sphinx plugin?

EDIT

This works

# Need to sleep because sometimes doxygen doesnt finish writing files before sphinx runs 
cwd = os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(__file__))
os.system('doxygen')
time.sleep(3)