Changes to default project 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.

Historically, Read the Docs installed a specific version of several dependencies based on the date your project was created. This caused odd issues where reimporting a project could change behavior, and caused users to continue using very old versions of build tools that weren’t supported by their authors. This was done to maintain backwards compatibility, but our platform now has robust support for defining a build environment, so we encourage you to pin your dependencies instead.

Starting on October 3rd default dependencies installed for each project build will change. If your project was previously depending on these default dependencies, your project’s builds may encounter errors or failures due to missing packages.

To resolve these build failures we recommend defining all of your project’s dependencies. See the examples below for guidance on how to update your project configuration or learn more about managing dependencies in our guide for reproducible builds.

The changes to default dependencies installed during the build process are:

version: 2

# Set the OS, Python version and other tools you might need
build:
  os: ubuntu-22.04
  tools:
    python: "3.11"

 python:
   install:
     - requirements: docs/requirements.txt

sphinx==6.2.1
sphinx-rtd-theme==1.2.2
pillow==5.4.1
mock==1.0.1
commonmark==0.9.1
recommonmark==0.5.0

version: 2

# Set the OS, Python version and other tools you might need
build:
  os: ubuntu-22.04
  tools:
    python: "3.11"

 python:
   install:
     - requirements: docs/requirements.txt

mkdocs==1.5.1