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Read the Docs newsletter - January 2024

We have shipped New improvements to redirects, making our redirects much more powerful and flexible.

We have shipped an updated approach to notifications. Currently there isn’t much UX difference, but as we move forward with this project we will be able to provide more context and control to users.

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New improvements to redirects

As your documentation evolves, content is moved, and pages are renamed, leading to broken links for your users. Redirects allow you to point users to the new location of a page.

We are excited to announce significant improvements to our redirects feature to make them more flexible and powerful.

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Read the Docs newsletter - December 2023

We have shipped single version projects to allow projects to be versioned without having translations. This is a long-requested feature that we’ve excited to ship based on our Proxito refactor work.

We improved our webhook security by requiring a secret to be configured for all webhooks. This will help prevent malicious actors from triggering builds and other actions.

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Introducing support for version-only projects

URLs are an important part of your documentation. Users can infer from the URL if your documentation has or supports multiple versions or translations.

Until now, Read the Docs allowed you to configure your project in two ways:

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Security update on incoming webhooks from integrations

Webhooks from integrations (like GitHub) are used to:

Trigger builds when a new commit is pushed to a repository.

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Read the Docs newsletter - November 2023

Work continues on hardening Addons, our new in-documentation JavaScript client that supports all documentation tools. We’re looking for people in the community to test out this new functionality, and will be expanding access in the near future.

Python 3.12 is now supported on builds, and is the default version used when you specify build.tools.python: 3 in your configuration file.

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Language codes are now normalized

The following language codes are now normalized to be lowercase and use a dash as a separator instead of an underscore:

nb_NO is now nb-no

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Read the Docs newsletter - September 2023

🚀 We started testing a new flyout menu as part of our beta test for documentation addons. The beta test is currently limited to projects using the build.commands configuration key.

🛣️ We continue to have a number deprecations in progress. We announced this month deprecations of installing using system packages, the configuration key build.image, and installation of pinned versions of Sphinx and MkDocs. Keep an eye on your email for any deprecation notifications, as we will continue to notify maintainers of projects that might be impacted.

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Addons flyout menu beta

We are happy to announce that a new flyout menu is now available as part of the ongoing beta test for our latest project, Read the Docs Addons.

After much hard work, we are excited to begin testing this feature with more projects. We have previously been testing other documentation features as part of this ongoing beta, but the flyout menu is by far the most prominent feature yet.

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Changes to default project dependencies

This post was updated on Oct 10 to reflect all of the changes to installed dependencies

We are announcing the deprecation of automatic installation of several key project dependencies, and builds will no longer install older documentation tool versions by default.

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Use build.os instead of build.image on your configuration file

We are announcing the deprecation of build.image config key in favor of build.os. Read the Docs will start requiring a build.os config key for all projects in order to build documentation successfully. We will start failing builds for projects not using “build.os” in their config file on October 16, 2023.

We understand this change will affect many of our users, so we have a timeline to communicate this deprecation to our users effectively.

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Drop support for “Use system packages”

Read the Docs used to pre-install common scientific Python packages like scipy, numpy, pandas, matplotlib and others at system level to speed up the build process. However, with all the work done in the Python ecosystem and the introduction of “wheels”, these packages are a lot easier to install via pip install and these pre-installed packages are not required anymore. If you have Apt package dependencies, they can be installed with build.apt_packages.

With the introduction of our new “Ubuntu 20.04” and “Ubuntu 22.04” Docker images, we stopped pre-installing these extra Python packages and we encouraged users to install and pin all their dependencies using a requirements.txt file. We have already stopped supporting “use system packages” on these newer images.

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Read the Docs newsletter - August 2023

🏝️ A few team members took vacations this month, and everything kept running smoothly, which is always wonderful to see.

⏩ Our git cloning code was refactored, and now projects should be building much faster. The more git branches and tags you have, the faster the build will be.

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Builds with no index.html at its output’s directory are deprecated

Historically, Read the Docs has created an auto-generated index.html file with minimal instructions about how to setup the project correctly when your build didn’t output this file. This auto-generated file has confused more users than it has helped because the behavior on Read the Docs was different from the behavior on their local environment.

To better onboard users, we have deprecated the auto-creation of index.html files on Read the Docs projects. We will now check for an index.html file at the end of the build, and fail it with a clear message of the problem if there is no index.html file in the top level of your output directory.

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Doctools without configuration file (conf.py / mkdocs.yml) are deprecated

Historically Read the Docs has created a conf.py file for Sphinx projects and a mkdocs.yml file for MkDocs projects that don’t provide one, to make onboarding easier. This has been confusing a lot our users in different ways and we will remove the auto-creation of a default Sphinx/MkDocs configuration file for projects that don’t have one on August 28th. To avoid unexpected behavior or your documentation builds failing, you should add a configuration file to your project by this date.

The auto-creation of a default configuration file will be completely removed on August 28th. Add a conf.py/mkdocs.yml to your projects before this date to avoid unexpected build failures.

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Support for PyPy3 removed

Starting on July 18, 2023 PyPy3 will be removed as an option to build documentation on Read the Docs.

This feature was introduced as an alternative to make Sphinx build faster. However, we found there are no projects building their documentation with PyPy3 and we decided to remove its support to simplify our product and reduce development maintanence.

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Python “core requirements” for new projects will install latest version

Starting on August 7, 2023 all new projects imported on Read the Docs will install only sphinx, mkdocs and readthedocs-sphinx-ext as “core requirements”. The default behavior will be to install the latest version of these requirements.

Note that previously Read the Docs was installing also jinja, sphinx-rtd-theme, pillow, mock, alabaster, commonmark and recommonmark specifying particular versions depending on different factors that were confusing for users and hard to debug.

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Read the Docs newsletter - July 2023

🚀 We shipped support for customizing the URL path for projects and subprojects, allowing you to remove or customize the /projects/ path on subprojects. This is enabled via Support request currently, and only on certain plans on Read the Docs for Business.

🛣️ Deprecations underway: We have a number of old feature deprecations underway. The goal here is to reduce complexity of our build platform, and enable users to control their own builds via build.tools and build.commands instead of feature flags. Keep an eye on your email for any deprecation notifications that might impact your project.

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Read the Docs newsletter - June 2023

⚠️ A .readthedocs.yaml configuration file will be required for your future builds. Read more about this change in Migrate your project to .readthedocs.yaml configuration file v2.

✅️ Visiting a language slug of a project without specifying the version now redirects to the default version. For instance, /en/ redirects to /en/latest/.

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Migrate your project to .readthedocs.yaml configuration file v2

We are announcing a new requirement for all builds to use our configuration file version 2. This announcement deprecates builds without a configuration file, as well as version 1 of our configuration file.

Read the Docs will start requiring a .readthedocs.yaml configuration file for all projects in order to build documentation successfully. We will stop supporting builds without explicit configuration, because this creates implicit dependencies that users aren’t aware of. We plan to start failing builds not using configuration file version 2 on September 25, 2023.

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Read the Docs newsletter - May 2023

🚁️ The proxy application El Proxito has been rewritten. El Proxito resolves URLs for all documentation websites hosted on Read the Docs. The new rewrite improves the performance of the resolver and makes it possible to add planned features.

🔎️ …One of the new features available in the new El Proxito implementation, is an improved 404 page (see the screenshot below). The new 404 page is contextualized and contains better error messages and tips for users and project owners. We are gradually rolling out the new El Proxito while monitoring its stability, and users will experience new features only on projects where it has been enabled.

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Read the Docs newsletter - April 2023

📚️ Over the past ~6 months, we gradually refactored our user documentation to align with the Diátaxis Framework. The results are now manifested in the structure of the navigation sidebar and the landing page on docs.readthedocs.io.

📊️ All of our websites now use Plausible for analytics.

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Read the Docs website migration to about.readthedocs.com

Read the Docs is in the process of migrating our primary marketing website to a single site: https://about.readthedocs.com. The new site offers users more information about our products and their features, in a combined presentation of what was previously divided between two websites (Read the Docs Community (readthedocs.org) and Read the Docs for Business (readthedocs.com)). The new site will also serve as a single entrypoint for users that are logging in to Read the Docs accounts. There has been a good deal of confusion around our two sites, and this change makes it more clear which site you’re going to.

Importantly, we are keeping both our Community and Business sites separate for logged in users. There are no changes in our commitment to offering free hosting for open source, or the separation of infrastructure for Business customers.

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Read the Docs newsletter - March 2023

⭐️ We passed our 10,000th issue/pull request on GitHub. And it’s pretty much an equal split between the 5039 issues and 4872 pull requests now registered. Thanks to the whole community for building this together through code, issues, suggestions… and documentation!

🌪️ Follow up: Build times have gone rapidly down after last month’s introduction of parallel uploading of artifacts with rclone. Depending on the number of files in your build output, build times may have gone down several seconds or several minutes. For instance, a large project like Write the Docs has gone down from ~7 minutes to under 3 minutes. If you want to see the change for your project, have a look at your build times before and after February 8.

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Read the Docs newsletter - February 2023

Here are the latest updates from our team since the previous newsletter:

🪄️ Build outputs are now stored in a well-known location: _readthedocs/<format>. This opens up many new and exciting possibilities for generating and processing final output formats, which we will uncover in an upcoming blog post. PDFs for MkDocs and encrypted documentation are just two demos that we have ready. Stay tuned!

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Read the Docs newsletter - January 2023

Happy 2023!

Here are the latest updates from our team since the previous newsletter:

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Sphinx 6 is out and has important breaking changes

Important updates to this post ⬇️

sphinx-rtd-theme 1.2.0 has been released with support for Sphinx 6.

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Read the Docs newsletter - December 2022

This newsletter contains the first features and updates that have hatched since we announced a Q4 focus on core platform features in the previous newsletter.

Here are the latest updates from our team:

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Override the build process completely with build.commands

We are happy to announce a new beta feature that allows users to override the Read the Docs build process completely. We previously talked about executing custom commands in-between the Read the Docs build process. That approach is not sufficient for projects with a heavily customized build process, or those that want to use a different documentation tool like Pelican, Docsify and Docusaurus for their documentation. Some of which were not able to use our platform at all. Until now! We have good news for them!

The new configuration file option build.commands allows projects to only execute exactly the commands they want. No more. No less. This means that Read the Docs won’t execute any of the default commands behind the scenes. You have 100% control over the build process.

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Read the Docs newsletter - November 2022

Here are the first features and updates that have hatched since we announced a Q4 focus on core platform features in the previous newsletter.

The latest updates from our team:

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Announcing sphinx_rtd_theme 1.1.0

We are happy to announce the release of new version of our theme, sphinx-rtd-theme. In this release, we have focused on bug fixes, backwards compatibility, and making the way for future releases.

Visually, we have a couple of small tweaks that most people won’t notice unless we mention them here 😇 The objective of the 1.1 release is to maintain backwards compatibility, and that also goes for the visual parts.

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GitLab service re-connection required

Some months ago GitLab started enforcing an expiration time of two hours for all of their OAuth tokens.

Unfortunately this broke the integration with our application, so your OAuth tokens may have expired. OAuth tokens are used to interact with the GitLab API, for reporting the status of merge requests, creating webhooks, and listing repositories. In order for Read the Docs to have access to new fresh tokens, you need to re-connect your GitLab account. You can do this by:

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Read the Docs newsletter - October 2022

September was exciting because a few members of our team finally got to gather in person. Manuel, Benjamin, and Eric all attended Djangocon Europe in September, and had lots of great discussions around documentation.

Also, as we mentioned, in Q4 we’re going to be focusing on our core platform features. This means we’ll have fewer new features to talk about, but lots of smaller improvements to the overall experience of using Read the Docs.

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Auto-canceling builds when pushing to the same branch twice

Read the Docs allows you to keep your documentation up to date in a simple way, by triggering a new build each time developers push a git repository. Depending on your workflow, there could be situations where multiple pushes are done during a short time window. This causes a situation where you have to wait a long time for a build that will be immediately overwritten.

To avoid waiting for those builds to be executed, we implemented a new feature to cancel these useless builds and only execute the latest one. This considerably improves the user experience and also reduces resource costs and energy waste.

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Knowing more about how people use our service

Read the Docs generates a lot of data. We are the largest documentation platform out there, with hundreds of thousands of projects using our product every day to host their documentation. This data includes simple things like number of users, builds using a particular Docker image, as well as more interesting ones like pageviews or Python dependencies installed via a requirements.txt file. We didn’t collect this data in a systemic way during the first 10 years of our existence.

Last year, with the growth of our product and the team, plus the CZI grant we received, we started asking ourselves some questions that we couldn’t answer with the data we had. We decided to start working on a project to collect relevant data to answer a large number of questions about how people use our service.

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Read the Docs newsletter - September 2022

Our focus for August has continued to be around marketing and community outreach. We continue to better understand how our customers view our product, and work with them to use it well.

We’re working to establish our goals for Q4 2022, and it looks like continued focus on polishing core platform features. We have a lot of features, and we need to continue making them easier to use.

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Read the Docs newsletter - August 2022

We continue to be excited about the expanded capacity we have with an additional team member. Our focus for July has been around a lot of marketing and positioning, trying to better understand how our customers view our product, and work with them to use it well.

We also had our 12th birthday just before publishing this newsletter. 🎉

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Read the Docs newsletter - July 2022

Summer has come, which means our overall development has slowed a bit as the team takes some well-deserved vacation time. That said, we’re still excited about our recent hire and the ongoing work we’ve been doing to support the documentation ecosystem.

Our focus for Q3 (July-Sept) of 2022 is around improving our frontend and marketing pages. This includes a fancy new marketing website, as well as a revamped dashboard UX that will make many features nicer for our users.

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Read the Docs newsletter - June 2022

We’re excited to welcome Benjamin Balder Bach to our team, joining as a part-time contractor for now. He’s a developer with a history of working as an Open Source maintainer and event organizer in the Django community. He has also previously contributed to Read the Docs and will be a wonderful addition to the team.

We’re also excited to see people using our new build.jobs feature that we previously announced. There are a lot of interesting ways to adapt the build process with this, and we’ll continue to watch with interest how people are using it!

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Announcing user-defined build jobs

We are happy to announce a new feature to specify user-defined build jobs on Read the Docs. If your project requires custom commands to be run in the middle of the build process, they can now be executed with the new config key build.jobs. This opens up a complete world full of new and exciting possibilities to our users.

If your project has ever required a custom command to run during the build process, you probably wished you could easily specify this. You might have used a hacky solution inside your Sphinx’s conf.py file, but this was not a great solution to this problem.

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Read the Docs newsletter - May 2022

April has been another exciting month here at Read the Docs. We’ve gotten a few good candidates for our Product-focused Application Developer job posting, and we’re on to the second round of interviews. Expect to hear more about any new team members here in the next couple months.

We’ve continued building a number of features and bug fixes in our roadmap:

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Read the Docs newsletter - April 2022

March has been a productive month for Read the Docs. We have finished our Product-focused Application Developer job posting, which we’re excited about. We plan to share this on a few job boards, and are looking for someone to join the team who is excited to work on our product.

We’ve continued building a number of features and bug fixes in our March roadmap:

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Read the Docs 2021 Stats

2021 continued in the realm of being a tough year. That said, Read the Docs had a lot of good things happen this year.

We did a majority of the work on our CZI grant, grew our team from 5 to 8, and continued to grow our EthicalAds network & Read the Docs for Business. It’s been another year of steady growth, and we hope to continue that into 2022.

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Read the Docs newsletter - March 2022

It’s been pretty quiet on the company front in February, with nothing much to report. We’re actively working on our latest job description, which will be a product-focused Python development position. If you’re interested, please let us know.

In February we continued to work on refactors and internal changes. Among the major user-facing changes:

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War in Ukraine and what it means for Read the Docs

With news surrounding the invasion of Ukraine evolving rapidly, we felt it was necessary to provide an update to our users and customers.

At Read the Docs, we are outraged and saddened by the invasion of Ukraine and we condemn this act of violence as wrong and unlawful. We are monitoring the situation in Europe and how it relates to our employees, customers, and our services to the open source world.

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Deprecation of the git:// protocol on GitHub

Last year, GitHub announced the deprecation of the unsecured Git protocol due to security reasons. This change will be made permanent on March 15, 2022.

At Read the Docs we found around 900 projects using a Git protocol URL (git://github.com/user/project) to clone their projects. To save time for our users, we have migrated those to use the HTTPS cloning URL instead (https://github.com/user/project).

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Read the Docs newsletter - February 2022

Welcome to the latest edition of our monthly newsletter, where we share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

We have mostly finished migrating Read the Docs for Business users to Cloudflare for SSL. There are lots of interesting features this will enable, so stay tuned for updates there.

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Sphinx 4.4 release and other ecosystem news

In this post we spread the word about the most relevant news of the Sphinx ecosystem of the past weeks, including Sphinx itself as well as extensions and themes developed by the community.

Sphinx 4.4 was released on January 17th with numerous changes, including:

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Read the Docs newsletter - January 2022

Welcome to the latest edition of our monthly newsletter, where we share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

We are now managing custom domains for our corporate users using Cloudflare SSL for SaaS, which will remove the manual work that was needed on our side and make the process of setting up a custom domain almost instantaneous. It also will allow us to offer a CDN much easier in the future.

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Sphinx and Markdown around the world in 2021

Read the Docs has been committed to improving the accessibility and user experience of Sphinx since the start, and that includes the markup language in which the documentation is written. Years ago, after carefully listening to users, we announced recommonmark to help bridging the immense popularity of Markdown with the powerful capabilities of Sphinx. (It is now deprecated in favor of MyST - keep reading to know more.)

It is no surprise that Markdown is in such demand: thanks in large part to the huge popularity of GitHub, Markdown is nowadays the most widely used markup language in open-source projects, ahead of reStructuredText, the second in the list, by an order of magnitude.

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Read the Docs newsletter - December 2021

Welcome to the latest edition of our monthly newsletter, where we share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

We successfully deployed mitigation measures against spam, and we are happy to report that the amount of abusive projects has dramatically decreased.

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Announcing Embed API v3 and sphinx-hoverxref 1.0

We are thrilled to announce the availability of Read the Docs Embed API v3, along with its official client, sphinx-hoverxref 1.0. This work has been possible in part thanks to the the CZI grant we received.

As we wrote in our first blog post about sphinx-hoverxref, one of the most powerful features of Sphinx is the possibility of creating cross references to other documentation projects. However, a reader finding several links in a technical documentation might need to open several browser tabs to fully understand the context, resulting in a lot of friction in the form of context switching.

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Read the Docs ❤️ Jupyter Book

We are proud to announce that now Jupyter Book projects are supported on Read the Docs!

Both Read the Docs and The Executable Book Project, the folks behind Jupyter Book, share a common passion for documentation, and we have been collaborating on various topics for some time already. For example, we started promoting MyST in favor of our recommonmark back in April this year, and we wrote a guide on using Jupyter notebook with Sphinx that benefitted a lot from their feedback.

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Read the Docs newsletter - November 2021

Welcome to the latest edition of our monthly newsletter, where we share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

During the first week of November we attended the 2021 Essential Open Source Software for Science Annual Meeting, an event organized by the CZI Science team. We are thrilled to connect with projects in the Open Science ecosystem.

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Build errors with docutils 0.18

Starting about a week ago, some users started reporting new errors with their project builds. In most cases, these errors appeared out of nowhere and are usually rather cryptic errors referencing Sphinx and docutils.

So, what is happening?

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Ubuntu 20.04, Python 3.10, and support for Node, Rust, and Go

We are excited to announce that now Read the Docs users can use a newer build specification in their projects that will change the base image to one based on Ubuntu 20.04, ship the recently released Python 3.10, and allow users to easily specify the version of Node.js, Rust, and Go. This feature has been a long time in the making, and we think it will simplify the configuration of many projects.

The Docker images used by our builders were based on Ubuntu 18.04. Recently, we added a new feature to install custom system packages, which allowed many projects to have better control of their build process without having to use conda to manage non-Python dependencies.

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Read the Docs newsletter - October 2021

Welcome to the latest edition of our monthly newsletter, where we share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

We have resumed sending our blog updates by email. You can subscribe to our newsletter so you don’t miss them.

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Read the Docs newsletter - September 2021

Welcome to the latest edition of our monthly newsletter, where we share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

We have published the first release candidate of version 1.0.0 of our Sphinx theme, which adds support for recent versions of Sphinx and docutils among other things, and announced our future plans for it. Check out the linked blog post to know more. Update: We have released 1.0 to PyPI

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Theme release 1.0.0rc1

The 1.0.0 version of sphinx_rtd_theme was released Sept 13, 2021. You can install the latest version with:

Alternatively, you can upgrade the version installed using:

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Read the Docs newsletter - August 2021

Welcome to the latest edition of our monthly newsletter, where we share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

We have a new team member! Ana just joined us as Frontend Developer in the context of the CZI grant we were awarded to work on our JavaScript documentation embedding client and the Read the Docs redesign and UX.

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Read the Docs newsletter - July 2021

Welcome to a new edition of our monthly newsletter, where we share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

Eric presented the history of the company at the Upstream 2021 conference along with ideas for open source sustainability. You can read more about it in our recent blog post.

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Early 2021 talks and podcasts from Read the Docs

During the first half of 2021 several team members of Read the Docs have talked about the company in podcasts and online events. If you want to learn more about our company directly from the people that are a core part of it, and hear our thoughts on other topics like open source sustainability and developer advocacy, this blog post is for you.

Eric was the special guest of Sustain back in February, “a podcast about sustaining open source in the long haul”. Eric started by telling the story of how he and Anthony co-founded Read the Docs, talked about the Write the Docs community, described the challenges of launching EthicalAds in 2020, and discussed the opportunities of using ethical advertising to fund open source projects.

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New release of sphinx-hoverxref with support for intersphinx

We have released version 0.6b1 of sphinx-hoverxref, a Sphinx extension that shows a content preview of a cross-reference.

This extension is an essential part of the work we are doing to improve interoperability of documentation in general, and scientific documentation in particular, thanks to the CZI grant we received last year.

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Read the Docs newsletter - June 2021

Welcome to a new edition of our monthly newsletter, where we openly share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

We applied to the next round of the CZI Essential Open Source Software for Science! Our proposal is even more ambitious than the previous one, and we are excited about the possibilities for our users if we get accepted. The funding would cover 2 years of work, starting in 2022.

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Install custom operating system packages (apt)

We are thrilled to announce that now Read the Docs users can declare custom operating system packages in their project configuration that will get installed in our Ubuntu-based builders using apt. This has been a long awaited feature, and we think it will simplify the configuration of many projects, especially scientific ones.

The Ubuntu images used by our builders contain lots of preinstalled system packages that we ship to all the projects to make the most common use cases possible. This includes compilers, development headers of common libraries, and others.

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Read the Docs newsletter - May 2021

Welcome to a new edition of our monthly newsletter, where we openly share the most relevant updates around Read the Docs, offer a summary of new features we shipped during the previous month, and share what we’ll be focusing on in the near future.

The team keeps growing! Ra will join us next week to do account management for EthicalAds.

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Read the Docs newsletter - April 2021

This is the first of our monthly newsletters, in which we would like to openly share with you the most relevant updates of Read the Docs, offer a summary of what new features we shipped to our users during the previous month, and share what things we will be focusing on in the near future.

We have a new colleague! Juan Luis will be working with us as Developer Advocate, with a focus on fulfilling the goals of the CZI grant we were awarded, improve our public facing documentation, and spread the word about our service.

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Read the Docs 2020 Stats

2020 was a rough year for everyone, including our team. We managed to make it through, and continue to have 5 folks working full-time to make Read the Docs better for you.

We are going into 2021 with a new grant, which will require us to do some hiring. We also launched our EthicalAds network, which is bringing our approach to sustainability to the tech community as a whole.

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API v3 is now stable

We are excited to announce that our API v3 has reached a stable release, and is now available for all Read the Docs users. Since we announced the API v3 beta, we have been adding extra functionality and bug-fixing minor issues based on user feedback.

The new API v3 is not a fully replacement (yet!) of API v2, but we highly recommend using API v3 for all the new integrations. API v2 will be deprecated soon, though we don’t have a firm timeline for deprecation. We will alert users with our plans when we do.

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Read the Docs Community downtime due to migrations to AWS

Update: The migration was successful and the site has been fully restored as of 4PM PST.

We wanted to make you aware that on Friday, February 12th at 1pm PST (4pm EST, 21:00 UTC), Read the Docs Community (readthedocs.org) will be having a scheduled dashboard downtime of approximately 4 hours.

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Pull Request Builders available for all users

We’re excited to announce that Pull Request building is now available for all Read the Docs users. We have been working on this feature for over a year, and having it available for all our users is a major milestone.

This feature allows users to confirm documentation builds correctly for all of their commits, not just ones merged into branches that are activated on Read the Docs. This moves documentation into your continuous integration pipeline, and improves the workflow for everyone working on documentation.

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Read the Docs for Business Maintenance Window - February 5

Update: This maintenance window has concluded at 5:40 PM PST.

We wanted to make you aware that on Friday, February 5 at 5:00pm PST (8:00pm EST, Saturday 01:00 UTC), Read the Docs for Business (readthedocs.com) will be having a scheduled downtime of approximately 2 hours.

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Read the Docs is hiring for multiple positions

Read the Docs received a grant to support scientific software at the beginning of this year. As part of this, we are hiring for two new positions related to the grant work:

A frontend developer with design skills

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Announcing Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Grant to Expand the Interoperability of Scientific Documentation

We’re excited to announce that Read the Docs has received a $200,000 grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Essential Open Source for Science (EOSS) program. Read the Docs is the largest open source documentation hosting platform in the world. We provide hosting for many scientific software packages, including some that have received EOSS funding in the past. You can read more about this round of grants in the official announcement.

Our grant has two parts:

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Advertising update and open sourcing our ad server

It’s been a while since our last advertising update and it felt like a good time to talk about what’s working with our advertising model and how things are getting better.

In our 2019 stats post, we broke out our advertising revenue which was fairly flat year over year. The way our ad business is structured, our revenue mostly grows with increases in traffic and Read the Docs is mature enough that it isn’t doubling in size every year.

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Shipping a CDN on Read the Docs Community

You might have noticed that our Read the Docs Community site has gotten faster in the past few weeks. How much faster likely depends on how far away you live from Virginia, which is where our servers have traditionally lived.

We have recently enabled a CDN on all Read the Docs Community sites, generously sponsored by CloudFlare. This post will talk a bit more about how we implemented this, and why we’re excited about it.

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Read the Docs 2019 Stats

2019 was another good year for Read the Docs. We continue to have a team of 5 folks working on the project, and we’ve rolled out a number of new features for the year.

Here are our stats for the past year, which we’ve published since 2013. This is part of our effort to be transparent in our organization, as well as our source code.

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Automation Rules

A time ago we introduced a new feature to help users to automate some tasks on Read the Docs. Automation rules.

If you manage a project with several versions, you may have noticed that Read the Docs doesn’t always activate your new versions 1. If you require to do any action over a new version, you’ll need to log in your Read the Docs account and manually do so.

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Better support for scientific project documentation

In the past year, we’ve been having issues when building projects’ documentation using conda. Our build servers were running out of memory and failing projects’ builds. Read the Docs has this memory constraint to avoid misuse of the platform, causing a poor experience for other users.

Our first solution was a dedicated server for these kind of projects. We would manually assign them to this server on user requests. This workaround worked okay, but it involves a bad experience for the user and also us doing a manual step each time. Over time, we hit again the same issue of OOM, even giving all the memory available to one project to build its documentation. After some research, we found that this is a known issue in the conda community and there are some different attempts to fix it (like mamba). Unfortunately, none of them became the standard yet and the problem is still there.

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Optimizing Sphinx Documentation for Search Engines

Recently, we published a guide on SEO for technical docs with the goal of helping documentation authors and project maintainers create docs so that end users can find what they’re looking for easier.

One developer asked me point blank after I mentioned our new guide, “Hasn’t Google closed most of the loopholes that sites use to rank better?”. I’ve heard this opinion from a few technologists before so I wasn’t too surprised. Moz.com, an authority on search engine optimization, makes a distinction between what they call black hat SEO and white hat SEO to differentiate between these “loopholes” and more useful site improvements that help SEO.

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Announcing API v3 Beta

In the last months, we have been working on making our API better. Considering the limitations of our current REST API v2, we decided to make a bigger step forward and create a new API v3, putting the focus on the use cases we heard about from existing users.

Compared to API v2, our new API v3 has some big differences that make it more user-friendly and useful.

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GSOC 2019: Autobuild Documentation for Pull Requests

Building documentation for pull requests is one of the most requested features of Read the Docs. Similar to how a continuous integration system runs a test suite on every pull request, this change would build the documentation for each pull request and send build status notification to the providers’ Status API (e.g. Github Status API). This will let users check if the documentation build passed and also how the documentation looks before merging it to master.

As a student of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2019, I (Maksudul Haque) was tasked with building this feature. The main goal of my project was to make it possible to build documentation whenever a pull request was created, and send build status notification to the Providers’ Status API.

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GSOC 2019: Improved Search Results and Search As You Type

Giving users the ability to easily find the information that they are looking for has always been important for Read the Docs. This year, I, Vaibhav Gupta, took the opportunity provided by Google Summer of Code to improve the search. The main goals of my GSoC project were:

to make a Sphinx extension to provide “search you type” experience to the users.

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Adding Custom CSS or JavaScript to Sphinx Documentation

In the Read the Docs documentation, we have a number of how-to guides to help people solve specific problems with Sphinx and Read the Docs. By far our most popular guide is on adding custom CSS and JavaScript to Sphinx.

In some older versions of Sphinx, this process was a little more challenging and it wasn’t as easy to figure out how to do it from the Sphinx docs. Sphinx 1.8 really streamlined this process especially for the simple cases.

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Read the Docs Offsite 2019

The Read the Docs team just finished our first offsite ever in April of 2019. We all gathered together in person for the first time, and talked about the future of the project.

A picture will show this better than I can:

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New Ad Format Coming to Read the Docs Community Sites

We view our ad program as a way to keep Read the Docs itself sustainable, and to use it to better support the community. Advertising has allowed us to have full-time employees adding new features and responding to issues in our issue tracker. We have also been able to share thousands of dollars with the open source community via our revenue share program and grants.

Currently, about 30% of our site traffic does not have any advertising. When we first launched ethical advertising in 2016, we launched only on specific documentation themes. We purposely did this slowly to make sure our ads look integrated with Read the Docs and less obtrusive to users.

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Ad Funding at Read the Docs and What’s Next for Ethical Advertising

It has been three years since we first launched ads on Read the Docs and while we gave a limited update in our 2018 stats, we figured it was time to give an update on ethical advertising and how it is working.

Our ethical advertising model is still going strong. We proved that it is possible to build a business model on top of advertising without resorting to user tracking. Unlike most other ad-supported sites, we show advertising based on the context of the page, not by creating behavoral profiles of large numbers of individual users. If you are browsing documentation for a Python project, you might see a relevant ad about Python. It’s that simple and it works.

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New Configuration File

We are happy to announce the new version of the Read the Docs configuration file (v2).

If you are a recurrent Read the Docs user, chances are that you’ve configured your projects using a .readthedocs.yml file.

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Tips for Getting a Developer Interview

Over the last month, the Read the Docs team conducted 30-40 customer development interviews with hiring managers and recruiters at companies ranging from 5-person companies to the biggest names in tech. We wanted to learn more about hiring processes at various companies with the ultimate goal of building a product to help companies find developers.

Last time, we covered some tips for hiring managers based on what companies told us they were doing. This time, we put together tips for candidates looking for their next job based on insights we heard from hiring managers.

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Defaulting New Projects to Python 3

New projects that are just getting started with Read the Docs will now use Python 3 by default. While it is still possible to configure your project to use Python 2.7 with our configuration file, we think it’s important to help push the Python ecosystem towards adopting Python 3.

Our default Python version is currently Python 3.7. Projects can also select Python versions 3.6 and 3.5 using our default build image. We will eventually remove support for building projects with Python versions 3.3 and 3.4, however it is still possible to select a build image with support for either version.

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Improved Search

Have you ever struggled with a poorly documented software project? What about a well documented project but you can’t find the right section inside the docs? The Read the Docs core team has realized the importance of good search for documentation and got me to take the challenge as a Google Summer of Code student. The main goal of my GSoC project was to refactor the search code together with upgrading the backend search engine, as well as adding more features to our search functionality like exact match search, case insensitive search, search as you type, suggestions and more.

Google Summer of Code is a global program where students work with an open source organization on a 3 month programming project. The core team of Read the Docs proposed some Project Ideas, one of them was Refactor & improve our search code. I (Safwan Rahman) was keen to get my hands dirty with Elasticsearch and grasped the opportunity to do so by applying for this project and I got accepted.

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Lessons From and For Hiring Managers

Over the last four weeks, the Read the Docs team did dozens of customer development interviews with engineering hiring managers. We wanted to learn more about hiring processes at various companies with the ultimate goal of building a product to help companies find developers. We talked to people looking for talent at five person companies all the way up to the biggest names in tech. In this post, I am going to cover some of the common things we heard from hiring managers and share some ways for hiring managers to improve their company’s process. In our next post in this series, I will have some actionable tips for job seekers based on the same interviews.

Since this is a long post, I figured I’d share some of the key takeaways:

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Incoming Webhook Deprecations

In the coming weeks and months, Read the Docs will be moving some projects away from our legacy incoming webhooks, towards our per-project webhook integrations.

Our legacy incoming webhooks were our first attempt at allowing providers like GitHub to automatically trigger builds on for projects on Read the Docs. These webhooks lacked a number of security features, and so, about two years ago, we replaced these with per-project webhook integrations instead. We added a number of features to per-project webhook integrations at the time, and we stopped new projects from using the old incoming webhooks.

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Read the Docs 2018 Stats

2018 was another good year for Read the Docs. We’ve settled into a sustainability model that is working for us, and have a team of 5 folks working full-time on the project.

Here are our stats for the past year, which we’ve published for the past 6 years. This is part of our effort to be transparent in our organization, as well as our source code.

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Tips to Hire Developers with Read the Docs

Read the Docs is probably not the first place you think of if you are recruiting. However, over 7 million unique developers use Read the Docs each month from all over the world. We didn’t set out to build a better job board, but after a number of advertisers used our ethical ads for recruiting, we discovered that Read the Docs was a great place to find developer talent.

Developers are not always actively job seeking by browsing job boards or company careers pages. However, they are on Read the Docs reading about the libraries and frameworks they use. Even when people aren’t actively looking for a new job, many are open to exploring new opportunities.

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Community Advertising

As part of our ethical advertising model, Read the Docs gives away 10% of our ad inventory to projects, conferences, and other initiatives in the open source community. Many of these projects operate as Read the Docs did in the past with little to no income. These are not groups that traditionally have the resources to use paid advertising.

We have run ads for:

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HTTPS for Custom Domains

Read the Docs hosts documentation for over 80,000 open source projects and over 2,500 of those projects are hosted on their own individual domains. Documentation hosted on *.readthedocs.io has supported HTTPS for a number of years, but one of our most requested features was to make HTTPS on other domains easy. Today we are happy to announce that Read the Docs supports HTTPS on custom domains!

Earlier this year, Cloudflare contacted us to support HTTPS for the thousands of open source documentation projects on their own domains. They generously provided us with their SSL for SaaS package to ease the integration on our side.

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Planned Move to Azure

We wanted to make you aware that on Saturday August 18 at 10:00am PDT (1:00pm EDT, 17:00 UTC), Read the Docs will be having a scheduled downtime of approximately 4 hours.

To ensure the stability and performance of our system, we are performing this upgrade during the weekend which is our period of lowest usage.

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Read the Docs Public API

Recently, we revamped Read the Docs’ public API. Previously, our latest API (v2) was used by our build processes but not heavily used by outside users.

As part of this process, we put effort into making sure the API is easy to use to access Read the Docs projects, builds, and versions, easier to filter builds and versions by a particular project, and that the documentation is up-to-date.

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Do Not Track at Read the Docs

Today, we are pleased to announce that Read the Docs honors Do Not Track (DNT). DNT is a browser preference that requests that a user not be tracked across the internet while browsing the web.

While there isn’t a consensus on precisely what DNT should mean, we are following the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) guidelines for Do Not Track as we believe that gives a good balance between the privacy expectations of users and the reality of running a business and keeping Read the Docs sustainable.

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GDPR: What it means for Read the Docs

Your email inbox has probably been bombarded over the last few days and weeks with “Updates to our Privacy Policy”. These emails pertain to an EU law called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which comes into effect today.

The goal of the GDPR is to put users back in control of their data. It is an important step toward respecting users’ privacy. The days of collecting as much data on as many people as possible without consent and sharing it with anyone willing to pay for it are over.

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Update on Ad Blocking and Acceptable Ads

A few weeks ago, we shared about the challenge ad blocking presented to our sustainability and what we were doing about it. On May 4th, Read the Docs was added to the Acceptable Ads list meaning that our visitors running ad blockers who choose to allow unintrusive advertising will see our ads again. The impact to our ad views, clicks, and revenue was immediate.

Estimates around the web vary regarding what percentage of people run ad blockers and it varies heavily by industry. We discussed this figure a bit in our previous post.

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Social Version Control Log in

Today we are announcing the ability to log in or sign up to Read the Docs with your favorite version control hosting services like GitHub, BitBucket, or GitLab. This was one of our most requested features and it has been something we’ve been meaning to launch for a long time.

For new users, the sign up process is significantly streamlined. There’s no new password to remember and when you’re ready to start building your docs, Read the Docs will be ready with a list of your repositories to get started.

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Ads and Ad blockers

Last time, we shared how ethical advertising works to keep Read the Docs sustainable without creepy ad targeting. This time, we will share about one of our biggest challenges with advertising. At the beginning of April, Read the Docs was added to one of the most popular ad block lists: the Easylist.

Getting added to the EasyList had a significant and immediate impact on the bottom line at Read the Docs. Right around April 1, 32% of our ad views simply vanished. At first, we thought we had done something horribly wrong but then we discovered that this was due entirely to ad blocking. Our actual traffic wasn’t down at all.

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Ethical Advertising Works

It has been two years since we first launched ads on Read the Docs. We figured it was time to report on the results that we’ve seen, and say thanks to those who have helped us along the way.

To put it simply:

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Python 3.6 Support

A long time back, we wrote about started testing a new build image that uses pyenv to support multiple versions of Python. Until recently, we were selectively opting projects in to help test the new image, but at the beginning of the year, we added a configuration option to allow projects to opt in to using the new image before we make it the default build image.

In the near future, this build image will be the default build image, but for now, you can manually opt your project in using our YAML configuration file.

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Read the Docs 2017 Stats

2017 was a good year for Read the Docs. We’ve settled into a sustainability model that is working for us, and have started to grow our team to be able to better support the community.

Here are our stats for the past year, which we’ve published for the past 5 years. This is part of our effort to be transparent in our organization, as well as our source code.

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MOSS Final Report

Last year, we were given a MOSS Award to work on improving the Python documentation ecosystem. We announced the initial deployment last November, and this is the retrospective post about how the project as a whole went.

This work is live at http://www.pydoc.io/ and on GitHub:

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Ads on the Alabaster Theme on Read the Docs Community Sites

We’ve been running our ethical advertising campaign for over a year now, and it is starting to show success on making Read the Docs more sustainable.

Over this time, we have only been running ads on Read the Docs themed projects. The primary reason for this is making sure that our display of ads is consistent and doesn’t negatively impact the user experience. We’re trying hard to build a sustainability model that respects our users, and making sure things are well designed and unobtrusive is an important part of this.

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PyCon 2017 in Review

Things are finally getting back to normal for us after another very busy PyCon. It’s always wonderful seeing old friends and getting a chance to meet new friends from the community. PyCon provides a great outlet to talk to others in our community about the problems we all face as open source developers and open source companies – like funding, sustainability, and building community. We are sad to see PyCon leave Portland, but luckily PyCascades will soon be filling the void left in Cascadia after PyCon moves on.

This year, we announced official sprints on Read the Docs during the sprint week following PyCon. We focused our sprint efforts on code cleanup, in order to avoid the problems on-boarding new contributors we normally face as a large project.

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Release for May 12, 2017

Yesterday, we rolled out improved webhook management for projects, and several bug fixes around our upgrade to Sphinx 1.5.

We’ve been slowly making upgrades to our webhook management page. Projects that set up new webhooks will see a list of webhooks that we have configured, including HTTP exchanges that we encounter from each remote webhook.

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Uniregistry sponsors Read the Docs and Open Source

Today we’re excited to announce an important sponsorship partner in our Ethical Advertising campaign: Uniregistry. Our goal with our ethical advertising program is to provide important funding for open source, and show that it can be done ethically – without tracking our users and only offering ads from relevant partners.

Domain registration was identified early as a natural partner to our program, because it sits in the stack of necessary infrastructure for all of us that work on making the internet. We wanted the right partner, because historically we feel that domain registration companies have had awful UX. We’ll cover a few of the criteria we used to reach the conclusion to partner with Uniregistry.

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Build Image Upgrades

Starting this week, we’ll be deploying a new default image for our documentation build environments. This image will change the default Python versions that are supported.

We aren’t expecting any issues to arise from this change, but be sure to raise any issues on our issue tracker if you notice any strange behavior. The new build image supports Python 2.7 and Python 3.5, dropping support for Python 3.4. If you require access to Python 3.4, we suggest you sign up for access to our next beta image.

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Read the Docs 2016 Stats

Congrats, you made it through 2016! Read the Docs has been rolling along, and we’ve had another interesting year as well.

For a quick summary:

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Announcing pydoc.io beta

Today we’re excited to announce our latest project: https://pydoc.io. This work was made possible by the MOSS Grant from Mozilla. Thanks to Mozilla for funding our time building this wonderful community resource.

Running Read the Docs, we’ve always been proud of the documentation tooling that the Python community has. We prioritize prose over API documentation listings, and generally have a high standard of documentation in our projects.

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Running ads with Sentry

We’re excited to announce our first partner in our Ethical Advertising campaign: Sentry.

Sentry was a natural first partner, both because they have a long history supporting and contributing to the open source community, and because they also strive to support open source while building a sustainable business around their project.

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Securing Subdomains

Starting today, Read the Docs will start hosting projects from subdomains on the domain readthedocs.io, instead of on readthedocs.org. This change addresses some security concerns around site cookies while hosting user generated data on the same domain as our dashboard.

Changes to provide security against broader threats have been in place for a while, however there are still a few scenarios that can only be addressed by migrating to a separate domain.

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Advertising on Read the Docs Community Sites

On Monday, we enabled an ad space on documentation pages hosted on readthedocs.org. We have tested the ad space in the past, and had followed up with a discussion of the implications of advertising. The space was meant to be totally unobtrusive to the browsing and usage of documentation pages, and doesn’t enable third-party tracking of users in any way. This is all in an effort to help raise funds to support continued support and maintenance on the project, and ensure free and open documentation stays available.

Read the Docs is a massive project, and requires a large amount of work to keep running and support. We receive support requests and must tend to the operations of the servers on a daily basis. Neither of these tasks lend to volunteer contributions, they both require dedicated support roles for such a large site. I’ve personally been wearing a pager in support of the project for over 4 years, all on a volunteer basis.

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Read the Docs 2015 Stats

2015 has been another great year for Read the Docs. We’ve addressed some long-standing issues like not having Markdown support, and built a number of wonderful tools for the documentation community.

You can always see our stats for the last 30 days.

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Read the Docs Awarded Mozilla Open Source Support Grant

Several months back, Mozilla launched a new initiative – the MOSS program – to provide financial support to the open source software projects it relies on. Mozilla allocated $1 million to the MOSS fund to provide grants for up to 10 projects matching the program’s criteria.

Read the Docs is among the first round of awards made for the MOSS program. Our proposed grant, for $48,000, is to build a separate instance that integrates with the Python Package Index’s upcoming website, Warehouse. This integration will provide automatic API reference documentation upon package release, with authentication tied to PyPI and simple configuration inside the distribution. API reference documentation on every release will be the starting point of this work, prose documentation generation will be more difficult here, as not all packages use Sphinx or rST for documentation.

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Read the Docs & Sphinx now support Commonmark

Read the Docs is built on top of Sphinx, which has always relied on reStructuredText as an input mechanism. We have long heard from folks that they want to write documentation in Markdown, as well as RST.

Today we are announcing that this is now possible! With the standardization of Markdown into Commonmark, we have the ability to support a markup language with a proper spec. recommonmark is the bridge that allows Commonmark to be used inside Sphinx. This allows you to use both RST and Commonmark inside of your Sphinx project.

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Securing Build Processes

We’ve recently introduced a new build container subsystem based on Docker to readthedocs.org, which should go mostly unnoticed for users. We’re still ironing out some bugs with the system, so raise an issue on our issue tracker if you are noticing any new issues with your project builds.

This new system is part of an over-due security update to help isolate arbitrary code execution. As Read the Docs has grown, protecting against arbitrary execution was a rapidly growing concern. This build isolation layer was developed as part of readthedocs.com, where security concerns are paramount due to private repository access. We’ve been testing it for roll out on the community site since then, but hadn’t committed to switching production build servers over due to the number of possible side effects.

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State of the Docs

August has historical significance for Read the Docs, so it seemed fitting to wrap up August by taking a moment to step back and reflect on what we’ve done in the last year.

What makes August so significant for us?

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Report - July 2015

August was a hectic month for us. So busy, in fact, we never wrote this update. We dropped the ball on getting this report out on time, but hope to keep on top of future updates.

July was a month of stability fixes, with some substantial changes to our infrastructure. First, here’s an update on some of the goals we had set with our last monthly update:

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Report - August 2015

August was a busy month for us. Write the Docs Europe was at the end of the month, and our focus has been on getting readthedocs.com into a public beta state. We’re nearing the end of the 3 month period that we budgeted for as part of our fundraiser and have a few more tasks to push out.

First, an update of the goals we set for this month:

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Report - June 2015

With the Write the Docs conference wrapped up in May, we shifted our focus back to Read the Docs for the remainder of May and June. Following our post on contract positions available with Read the Docs, we hired two contractors to work with us and focus on support and stability for readthedocs.org. Gregor Müllegger will be working on support and development, and Andrew Kreps has helped us on building and improving our operations infrastructure.

Read the Docs had the following major updates in June:

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Read the Docs is hiring!

Thanks to our successful fundraiser, we have the ability to pay people to work on Read the Docs.

We have two positions that we are looking for:

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Fundraising Wrapup

First off, a big ol’ thank you is in order for everyone that helped support us. You all helped us hit our funding goal, and with time to spare. We’re humbled to have such an abundance of support, and to know so many people share our vision for great documentation.

Really, thank you all. ❤

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Read the Docs 2014 Stats

2014 has been another banner year for Read the Docs. The project has been steadily growing in the open source ecosystem, expanding a good deal outside of the Python community. We have built a bunch of fantastic new features, and continued improving the documentation experience for the open source world.

You can always see our latest 30 days stats at http://www.seethestats.com/site/readthedocs.org.

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User-defined Redirects

Today we are announcing User-defined Redirects for Read the Docs. This has been a long requested feature that should cut down on 404’s when migrating your documentation.

Read the Docs has long had Redirects, but they are managed automatically for only certain use cases. This change allows users to control a specific set of common redirects.

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Badge Support

Documentation is an often overlooked part of a software project. Today we are releasing badges for your docs, so that people can easily see that your docs are up-to-date.

The main use of badges is to show the status of your project’s build. They will display in green for passing, red for failing, and yellow for unknown states.

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Welcome

Welcome to the Read the Docs blog.

We will be doing regular feature announcements on the blog as we build them. There are also a number of recently released features that we’ll highlight there as well.

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Read the Docs 2013 Stats

2013 has been a big year for Read the Docs. Our mission is to make documentation hosting easier, with the overall goal of increasing the quality of documentation in the programming world. I believe that we have been doing good work towards that goal, and I want to share some numbers to reflect our progress.

Our community has been great this year. I have been really happy to see a few people submit multiple patches and features. This year, we had:

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A New Theme for Read the Docs

We have been hard at work improving Read the Docs over the past month. A large amount of back end work has been going on, and now we have a brand new documentation theme to showcase it.

We have looked at how people use documentation, and built a beautiful and highly functional new interface for browsing documentation. We created a solution that looks great and works well.

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