Why HTTPS is important¶

HTTPS encrypts traffic between your computer and Read the Docs’ servers and allows your browser to verify that the website you are talking to is the one that you requested. HTTPS ensures there is no man-in-the-middle snooping on your connection.

Configuring your domain¶

If you followed our documentation for custom domains and you are using a CNAME to point to Read the Docs, no action is required on your part.

If you have had your Read the Docs setup for many years you may have followed some old directions that suggested creating a CNAME to readthedocs.org or <slug>.readthedocs.org. Depending on your setup, we may not have been able to issue a certificate for your domain. In that case, update your CNAME to point to readthedocs.io.

Why did it take so long?¶

It’s 2018! HTTPS is supposed to be easy, right? For a few domains, getting a certificate isn’t too hard. For 2,500+ domains, things get a bit more complicated.

We identified a number of challenges including:

• Retrying failed requests to issue certificates
• Handling when users remove DNS records that would allow us to issue certificates
• Getting our web servers and load balancers to handle dynamically adding and updating certificates on the fly
• Handling recurring tasks to re-issue updated certificates before they expire

Cloudflare reduced most of this complexity to a few API calls made when a new domain is configured or removed. Without their support, we would still be working on this feature.

Next steps¶

There are a few more things left on our road map for this feature. In the next few weeks we will begin to generate HTTPS links for custom domains where we have a certificate. After that change has been deployed for a few weeks, we will begin to redirect custom domain traffic to HTTPS.

As always, if you’re having any trouble with a particular domain, don’t hesitate to let us know in our issue tracker.