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.

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.

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).

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.