Recent posts

  • 05 December - 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.

  • 28 November - 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:

  • 14 November - 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.

  • 06 November - 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.

  • 24 October - 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

  • 05 September - 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.

  • 31 August - 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.

  • 24 August - 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.

  • 09 August - 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.

  • 08 August - 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.