Read the Docs Blog
Posts tagged builders
Build errors with docutils 0.18
- 02 November 2021
- Spokane, Washington
Starting about a week ago, some users started reporting new errors with their project builds. In most cases, these errors appeared out of nowhere and are usually rather cryptic errors referencing Sphinx and docutils.
So, what is happening?
Ubuntu 20.04, Python 3.10, and support for Node, Rust, and Go
- 14 October 2021
- Madrid, Spain
We are excited to announce that now Read the Docs users can use a newer build specification in their projects that will change the base image to one based on Ubuntu 20.04, ship the recently released Python 3.10, and allow users to easily specify the version of Node.js, Rust, and Go. This feature has been a long time in the making, and we think it will simplify the configuration of many projects.
The Docker images used by our builders were based on Ubuntu 18.04. Recently, we added a new feature to install custom system packages, which allowed many projects to have better control of their build process without having to use conda to manage non-Python dependencies.
Install custom operating system packages (apt)
- 19 May 2021
- Madrid, Spain
We are thrilled to announce that now Read the Docs users
can declare custom operating system packages in their project configuration
that will get installed in our Ubuntu-based builders using apt.
This has been a long awaited feature,
and we think it will simplify the configuration of many projects,
especially scientific ones.
The Ubuntu images used by our builders contain lots of preinstalled system packages that we ship to all the projects to make the most common use cases possible. This includes compilers, development headers of common libraries, and others.
Better support for scientific project documentation
- 28 April 2020
- Barcelona, Spain
In the past year, we’ve been having issues when building projects’ documentation using conda.
Our build servers were running out of memory and failing projects’ builds.
Read the Docs has this memory constraint to avoid misuse of the platform,
causing a poor experience for other users.
Our first solution was a dedicated server for these kind of projects. We would manually assign them to this server on user requests. This workaround worked okay, but it involves a bad experience for the user and also us doing a manual step each time. Over time, we hit again the same issue of OOM, even giving all the memory available to one project to build its documentation. After some research, we found that this is a known issue in the conda community and there are some different attempts to fix it (like mamba). Unfortunately, none of them became the standard yet and the problem is still there.