News and updates¶

• 🚀 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.

• 📚 The Read the Docs Sphinx theme package, sphinx-rtd-theme, had two releases. Version 1.3.0 was released, adding support for Sphinx 7.0. Version 2.0.0rc2 is also now out. This is a release candidate that will remove support for HTML4 output and will drop support for Sphinx versions prior to 5.0. We will be announcing the release candidate more this month and will be looking to have feedback from users.

• 🔐 A security advisory involving symlink abuse during project builds was raised and patched.

• 📉 Changes to our request handling resulted in a 30% reduction in response times for 404 error responses.

  

• 🏁 Updates to Proxito are now fully rolled out to Read the Docs Community and Read the Docs for Business.

• ✨ We upgraded our application to use Django 4.2.

Upcoming changes¶

• ⚠️ In line with our deprecation plans for builds without a configuration file, projects will be required to specify a configuration file to continue building their documentation starting September 25th. Our last brownout date is September 4th, lasting 48 hours. To avoid any problems building your project, ensure it has a configuration file before then.

• 🚢️ We will be continuing our work on for our beta test of Read the Docs Addons. Our focus is still on improving the new flyout menu, search, and adding more new features.

• 🛠️ Our new dashboard, currently available for beta testing at https://beta.readthedocs.org, will receive some small feature additions, and we are working towards a beta of the new dashboard for Read the Docs for Business as well. We expect to have more news here in the coming months.

Want to follow along with our development progress? View our full roadmap 📍️

Possible issues¶

• ⚠️ Make sure to follow directions from notifications regarding deprecations. We have notified project maintainers for any project that could be affected by one of our ongoing deprecations. Updating your package ahead of brownout dates and final deprecation cutoff dates will ensure your project continues to successfully build.

Questions? Comments? Ideas for the next newsletter? Contact us!