Feature Flags

Read the Docs offers some additional flag settings which can be only be configured by the site admin. These are optional settings and you might not need it for every project. By default, these flags are disabled for every project. A separate request can be made by opening an issue on our github to enable or disable one or more of these featured flags for a particular project.

Available Flags

PIP_ALWAYS_UPGRADE: Always run pip install –upgrade

UPDATE_CONDA_STARTUP: Upgrade conda before creating the environment

The version of conda used in the build process could not be the latest one. This is because we use Miniconda, which its release process is a little more slow than conda itself. In case you prefer to use the latest conda version available, this is the flag you need.

CONDA_APPEND_CORE_REQUIREMENTS: Append Read the Docs core requirements to environment.yml file

Makes Read the Docs to install all the requirements at once on conda create step. This helps users to pin dependencies on conda and to improve build time.

DONT_OVERWRITE_SPHINX_CONTEXT: Do not overwrite context vars in conf.py with Read the Docs context

DONT_SHALLOW_CLONE: Do not shallow clone when cloning git repos

The DONT_SHALLOW_CLONE flag is useful if your code accesses old commits during docs build, e.g. python-reno release notes manager is known to do that (error message line would probably include one of old Git commit id’s).

USE_TESTING_BUILD_IMAGE: Use Docker image labelled as `testing` to build the docs

EXTERNAL_VERSION_BUILD: Enable project to build on pull/merge requests