Recent posts¶

• 31 May - Migrate your project to .readthedocs.yaml configuration file v2

  We are announcing the deprecation of building without a configuration file (.readtehdocs.yaml) together with the deprecation of configuration file v1 as well.

  Read the Docs will soon start requiring a .readthedocs.yaml configuration file for all projects in order to build documentation successfully. We will stop creating a default configuration file behind the scenes, making assumptions for your projects, and automatically fixing problems with project configurations.

• 11 May - 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.

• 07 April - 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.

• 09 March - 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 and Read the Docs for Business). At the same time, 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.

• 07 March - 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.

• 07 February - 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!

• 10 January - Read the Docs newsletter - January 2023

  Happy 2023!

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

• 04 January - 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.

• 06 December - 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:

• 14 November - 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.