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:

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.

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:

We are happy to announce the release of new version of our theme, sphinx-rtd-theme. In this release, we have focused on bug fixes, backwards compatibility, and making the way for future releases.

Visually, we have a couple of small tweaks that most people won’t notice unless we mention them here 😇 The objective of the 1.1 release is to maintain backwards compatibility, and that also goes for the visual parts.

Some months ago GitLab started enforcing an expiration time of two hours for all of their OAuth tokens.

Unfortunately this broke the integration with our application, so your OAuth tokens may have expired. OAuth tokens are used to interact with the GitLab API, for reporting the status of merge requests, creating webhooks, and listing repositories. In order for Read the Docs to have access to new fresh tokens, you need to re-connect your GitLab account. You can do this by:

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.

Read the Docs allows you to keep your documentation up to date in a simple way, by triggering a new build each time developers push a git repository. Depending on your workflow, there could be situations where multiple pushes are done during a short time window. This causes a situation where you have to wait a long time for a build that will be immediately overwritten.

To avoid waiting for those builds to be executed, we implemented a new feature to cancel these useless builds and only execute the latest one. This considerably improves the user experience and also reduces resource costs and energy waste.

Read the Docs generates a lot of data. We are the largest documentation platform out there, with hundreds of thousands of projects using our product every day to host their documentation. This data includes simple things like number of users, builds using a particular Docker image, as well as more interesting ones like pageviews or Python dependencies installed via a requirements.txt file. We didn’t collect this data in a systemic way during the first 10 years of our existence.

Last year, with the growth of our product and the team, plus the CZI grant we received, we started asking ourselves some questions that we couldn’t answer with the data we had. We decided to start working on a project to collect relevant data to answer a large number of questions about how people use our service.

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.

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. 🎉

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.

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!

We are happy to announce a new feature to specify user-defined build jobs on Read the Docs. If your project requires custom commands to be run in the middle of the build process, they can now be executed with the new config key build.jobs. This opens up a complete world full of new and exciting possibilities to our users.

If your project has ever required a custom command to run during the build process, you probably wished you could easily specify this. You might have used a hacky solution inside your Sphinx’s conf.py file, but this was not a great solution to this problem.

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:

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:

2021 continued in the realm of being a tough year. That said, Read the Docs had a lot of good things happen this year.

We did a majority of the work on our CZI grant, grew our team from 5 to 8, and continued to grow our EthicalAds network & Read the Docs for Business. It’s been another year of steady growth, and we hope to continue that into 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:

With news surrounding the invasion of Ukraine evolving rapidly, we felt it was necessary to provide an update to our users and customers.

At Read the Docs, we are outraged and saddened by the invasion of Ukraine and we condemn this act of violence as wrong and unlawful. We are monitoring the situation in Europe and how it relates to our employees, customers, and our services to the open source world.

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).

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.

In this post we spread the word about the most relevant news of the Sphinx ecosystem of the past weeks, including Sphinx itself as well as extensions and themes developed by the community.

Sphinx 4.4 was released on January 17th with numerous changes, including:

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.