Product Overview of Read the Docs
Read the Docs is a comprehensive platform designed to simplify the management and hosting of software documentation, integrating seamlessly with the Git workflow that developers are already familiar with.
What Read the Docs Does
Read the Docs automates the process of building and hosting documentation, ensuring that your documentation remains up-to-date and synchronized with your code. This is achieved by integrating with popular version control systems such as GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket. Whenever changes are pushed to your repository, Read the Docs automatically rebuilds your documentation, ensuring that both your code and documentation are always current.
Key Features and Functionality
Automated Documentation Building
- Read the Docs builds your documentation automatically whenever changes are detected in your repository, ensuring that every version of your documentation is always up-to-date.
Multi-Version Support
- The platform can host multiple versions of your documentation, allowing you to maintain separate documentation for different versions of your software (e.g., version 1.0 and 2.0) by using separate branches or tags in your version control system.
Translation and Localization
- Documentation can be translated into multiple languages, and these translations are integrated into the URL structure of your documentation. This makes it easy to manage and access documentation in various languages.
Pull Request Previews
- Read the Docs allows you to preview changes in your documentation for every new pull request. This feature helps in catching formatting and display issues before the documentation is updated.
Custom Domain and Branding
- Projects can use their own custom domain names, and you can define a canonical domain to which all other domains will redirect. This allows for branding your documentation on your own domain with SSL automatically configured.
Search and Analytics
- The platform includes integrated search across all your projects and versions, as well as traffic analytics and search query data. This helps you understand how your documentation is being used and what users are searching for.
Security and Access Control
- Read the Docs offers features for managing permissions across multiple teams, single sign-on (SSO) for enhanced security, and the ability to share private documentation with contractors or customers. It also supports hosting private and password-protected documentation.
Performance and SEO
- Documentation projects are primarily static HTML pages, which are cached with a CDN to make them load faster for users. The platform also generates and hosts sitemaps automatically, improving search engine optimization.
Customization and Redirects
- Users can customize the `robots.txt` file and the 404 page. Additionally, custom URL redirects can be set up, including advanced functionality like folder redirects.
Output Formats
- Documentation can be output in various formats, including HTML, PDF, and EPUB, making it accessible for offline and cross-device viewing.
Plans and Community
Read the Docs offers free hosting for open-source software projects and paid plans starting at $50/month for business and internal documentation needs. The platform is open source and community-supported, relying on user contributions for development, support, and operations.
In summary, Read the Docs is a powerful tool that streamlines the documentation process by automating builds, providing multi-version support, and integrating with popular version control systems, all while offering robust features for customization, security, and analytics.