Posts tagged python

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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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