Building documentation for pull requests is one of the most requested features of Read the Docs. Similar to how a continuous integration system runs a test suite on every pull request, this change would build the documentation for each pull request and send build status notification to the providers’ Status API (e.g. Github Status API). This will let users check if the documentation build passed and also how the documentation looks before merging it to master.

As a student of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2019, I (Maksudul Haque) was tasked with building this feature. The main goal of my project was to make it possible to build documentation whenever a pull request was created, and send build status notification to the Providers’ Status API.

Have you ever struggled with a poorly documented software project? What about a well documented project but you can’t find the right section inside the docs? The Read the Docs core team has realized the importance of good search for documentation and got me to take the challenge as a Google Summer of Code student. The main goal of my GSoC project was to refactor the search code together with upgrading the backend search engine, as well as adding more features to our search functionality like exact match search, case insensitive search, search as you type, suggestions and more.

Google Summer of Code is a global program where students work with an open source organization on a 3 month programming project. The core team of Read the Docs proposed some Project Ideas, one of them was Refactor & improve our search code. I (Safwan Rahman) was keen to get my hands dirty with Elasticsearch and grasped the opportunity to do so by applying for this project and I got accepted.