Building and Contributing to Documentation

As one might expect, the documentation for Read the Docs is built using Sphinx and hosted on Read the Docs. The docs are kept in the docs/ directory at the top of the source tree.

Contributing through the Github UI

If you’re making small changes to the documentation, you can verify those changes through the documentation generated when you open a PR and can be accessed using the Github UI.

  1. click the checkmark next to your commit and it will expand to have multiple options

  2. right-click the “details” link next to the “docs/readthedocs.org:docs” item

    ../_images/details_link.png

  3. navigate to the section of the documentation you worked on to verify your changes

Contributing from your local machine

Note

You must use python 3.6 to generate the documentation.

If you’re making large changes to the documentation, you may want to verify those changes locally before pushing upstream.

  1. clone the readthedocs.org repository:

    git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/readthedocs/readthedocs.org/

  2. install documentation requirements

    cd readthedocs.org
pip install -r requirements/testing.txt
pip install -r requirements/docs.txt

  3. build the documents

    cd docs
make livehtml

  4. the documents will be available at http://127.0.0.1:4444/ and will rebuild each time you edit and save a file.

Guidelines

Please follow these guidelines when updating our docs. Let us know if you have any questions or something isn’t clear.

The brand

We are called Read the Docs. The the is not capitalized.

We do however use the acronym RTD.

Titles

For page titles, or Heading1 as they are sometimes called, we use title-case.

If the page includes multiple sub-headings (H2, H3), we usually use sentence-case unless the titles include terminology that is supposed to be capitalized.

Content

  • Do not break the content across multiple lines at 80 characters, but rather break them on semantic meaning (e.g. periods or commas). Read more about this here.

  • If you are cross-referencing to a different page within our website, use the doc role and not a hyperlink.

  • If you are cross-referencing to a section within our website, use the ref role with the label from the autosectionlabel extension.