Posts tagged feature

Announcing Embed API v3 and sphinx-hoverxref 1.0

We are thrilled to announce the availability of Read the Docs Embed API v3, along with its official client, sphinx-hoverxref 1.0. This work has been possible in part thanks to the the CZI grant we received.

As we wrote in our first blog post about sphinx-hoverxref, one of the most powerful features of Sphinx is the possibility of creating cross references to other documentation projects. However, a reader finding several links in a technical documentation might need to open several browser tabs to fully understand the context, resulting in a lot of friction in the form of context switching.

Read the Docs ❤️ Jupyter Book

We are proud to announce that now Jupyter Book projects are supported on Read the Docs!

Both Read the Docs and The Executable Book Project, the folks behind Jupyter Book, share a common passion for documentation, and we have been collaborating on various topics for some time already. For example, we started promoting MyST in favor of our recommonmark back in April this year, and we wrote a guide on using Jupyter notebook with Sphinx that benefitted a lot from their feedback.

Ubuntu 20.04, Python 3.10, and support for Node, Rust, and Go

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)

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.

API v3 is now stable

We are excited to announce that our API v3 has reached a stable release, and is now available for all Read the Docs users. Since we announced the API v3 beta, we have been adding extra functionality and bug-fixing minor issues based on user feedback.

The new API v3 is not a fully replacement (yet!) of API v2, but we highly recommend using API v3 for all the new integrations. API v2 will be deprecated soon, though we don’t have a firm timeline for deprecation. We will alert users with our plans when we do.

Pull Request Builders available for all users

27 January 2021
Eric Holscher
Bend, Oregon
pr-builder continuous-documentation feature

We’re excited to announce that Pull Request building is now available for all Read the Docs users. We have been working on this feature for over a year, and having it available for all our users is a major milestone.

This feature allows users to confirm documentation builds correctly for all of their commits, not just ones merged into branches that are activated on Read the Docs. This moves documentation into your continuous integration pipeline, and improves the workflow for everyone working on documentation.

Automation Rules

A time ago we introduced a new feature to help users to automate some tasks on Read the Docs. Automation rules.

If you manage a project with several versions, you may have noticed that Read the Docs doesn’t always activate your new versions [1]. If you require to do any action over a new version, you’ll need to log in your Read the Docs account and manually do so.

Announcing API v3 Beta

In the last months, we have been working on making our API better. Considering the limitations of our current REST API v2, we decided to make a bigger step forward and create a new API v3, putting the focus on the use cases we heard about from existing users.

Compared to API v2, our new API v3 has some big differences that make it more user-friendly and useful.

GSOC 2019: Autobuild Documentation for Pull Requests

14 August 2019
Maksudul Haque
Dhaka, Bangladesh
gsoc pr-builder continuous-documentation feature

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.

GSOC 2019: Improved Search Results and Search As You Type

13 August 2019
Vaibhav Gupta
Lucknow, India
gsoc search feature in-doc-search analytics

Giving users the ability to easily find the information that they are looking for has always been important for Read the Docs. This year, I, Vaibhav Gupta, took the opportunity provided by Google Summer of Code to improve the search. The main goals of my GSoC project were:

to make a Sphinx extension to provide “search you type” experience to the users.

New Configuration File

We are happy to announce the new version of the Read the Docs configuration file (v2).

If you are a recurrent Read the Docs user, chances are that you’ve configured your projects using a .readthedocs.yml file.

Improved Search

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.

HTTPS for Custom Domains

Read the Docs hosts documentation for over 80,000 open source projects and over 2,500 of those projects are hosted on their own individual domains. Documentation hosted on *.readthedocs.io has supported HTTPS for a number of years, but one of our most requested features was to make HTTPS on other domains easy. Today we are happy to announce that Read the Docs supports HTTPS on custom domains!

Earlier this year, Cloudflare contacted us to support HTTPS for the thousands of open source documentation projects on their own domains. They generously provided us with their SSL for SaaS package to ease the integration on our side.

Read the Docs Public API

Recently, we revamped Read the Docs’ public API. Previously, our latest API (v2) was used by our build processes but not heavily used by outside users.

As part of this process, we put effort into making sure the API is easy to use to access Read the Docs projects, builds, and versions, easier to filter builds and versions by a particular project, and that the documentation is up-to-date.

Social Version Control Log in

Today we are announcing the ability to log in or sign up to Read the Docs with your favorite version control hosting services like GitHub, BitBucket, or GitLab. This was one of our most requested features and it has been something we’ve been meaning to launch for a long time.

For new users, the sign up process is significantly streamlined. There’s no new password to remember and when you’re ready to start building your docs, Read the Docs will be ready with a list of your repositories to get started.

Release for May 12, 2017

Yesterday, we rolled out improved webhook management for projects, and several bug fixes around our upgrade to Sphinx 1.5.

We’ve been slowly making upgrades to our webhook management page. Projects that set up new webhooks will see a list of webhooks that we have configured, including HTTP exchanges that we encounter from each remote webhook.

Read the Docs & Sphinx now support Commonmark

Read the Docs is built on top of Sphinx, which has always relied on reStructuredText as an input mechanism. We have long heard from folks that they want to write documentation in Markdown, as well as RST.

Today we are announcing that this is now possible! With the standardization of Markdown into Commonmark, we have the ability to support a markup language with a proper spec. recommonmark is the bridge that allows Commonmark to be used inside Sphinx. This allows you to use both RST and Commonmark inside of your Sphinx project.

User-defined Redirects

Today we are announcing User-defined Redirects for Read the Docs. This has been a long requested feature that should cut down on 404’s when migrating your documentation.

Read the Docs has long had Redirects, but they are managed automatically for only certain use cases. This change allows users to control a specific set of common redirects.

Badge Support

Documentation is an often overlooked part of a software project. Today we are releasing badges for your docs, so that people can easily see that your docs are up-to-date.

The main use of badges is to show the status of your project’s build. They will display in green for passing, red for failing, and yellow for unknown states.

A New Theme for Read the Docs

We have been hard at work improving Read the Docs over the past month. A large amount of back end work has been going on, and now we have a brand new documentation theme to showcase it.

We have looked at how people use documentation, and built a beautiful and highly functional new interface for browsing documentation. We created a solution that looks great and works well.