Installation

Here is a step by step plan on how to install Read the Docs. It will get you to a point of having a local running instance.

Warning

Read the Docs does not itself run under Python 3 (though it does support building documentation for Python 3 projects). Please ensure the subsequent steps are performed using Python 2.7.

First, obtain Python 2.7 and virtualenv if you do not already have them. Using a virtual environment will make the installation easier, and will help to avoid clutter in your system-wide libraries. You will also need Git in order to clone the repository. If you plan to import Python 3 project to your RTD then you’ll need to install Python 3 with virtualenv in your system as well.

Note

If you are having trouble on OS X Mavericks (or possibly other versions of OS X) with building lxml, you probably might need to use Homebrew to brew install libxml2, and invoke the install with:

CFLAGS=-I/usr/local/opt/libxml2/include/libxml2 \
LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/opt/libxml2/lib \
pip install -r requirements.txt

Note

Linux users may find they need to install a few additional packages in order to successfully execute pip install -r requirements.txt. For example, a clean install of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS will require the following packages:

sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install python-dev python-pip python-setuptools
sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev zlib1g-dev

Users of other Linux distributions may need to install the equivalent packages, depending on their system configuration.

Note

If you want full support for searching inside your Read the Docs site you will need to install Elasticsearch.

Ubuntu users could install this package as following:

sudo apt-get install elasticsearch

Note

Besides the Python specific dependencies, you will also need Redis.

Ubuntu users could install this package as following:

sudo apt-get install redis-server

You will need to verify that your pip version is higher than 1.5 you can do this as such:

pip --version

If this is not the case please update your pip version before continuing:

pip install --upgrade pip

Once you have these, create a virtual environment somewhere on your disk, then activate it:

virtualenv rtd
cd rtd
source bin/activate

Create a folder in here, and clone the repository:

mkdir checkouts
cd checkouts
git clone https://github.com/rtfd/readthedocs.org.git

Next, install the dependencies using pip (included inside of virtualenv):

cd readthedocs.org
pip install -r requirements.txt

This may take a while, so go grab a beverage. When it’s done, build your database:

python manage.py migrate

Then please create a superuser account for Django:

python manage.py createsuperuser

Now let’s properly generate the static assets:

python manage.py collectstatic

By now, it is the right time to load in a couple users and a test project:

python manage.py loaddata test_data

Note

If you do not opt to install test data, you’ll need to create an account for API use and set SLUMBER_USERNAME and SLUMBER_PASSWORD in order for everything to work properly.

Finally, you’re ready to start the webserver:

python manage.py runserver

Visit http://127.0.0.1:8000/ in your browser to see how it looks; you can use the admin interface via http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin (logging in with the superuser account you just created).

For builds to properly kick off as expected, it is necessary the port you’re serving on (i.e. runserver 0.0.0.0:8080) match the port defined in PRODUCTION_DOMAIN. You can utilize local_settings.py to modify this. (By default, it’s localhost:8000)

While the webserver is running, you can build documentation for the latest version of a project called ‘pip’ with the update_repos command. You can replace ‘pip’ with the name of any added project:

python manage.py update_repos pip

What’s available

After registering with the site (or creating yourself a superuser account), you will be able to log in and view the dashboard.

From the dashboard you can import your existing docs provided that they are in a git or mercurial repo.

Creating new Docs

One of the goals of readthedocs.org is to make it easy for any open source developer to get high quality hosted docs with great visibility! We provide a simple editor and two sample pages whenever a new project is created. From there its up to you to fill in the gaps - we’ll build the docs, give you access to history on every revision of your files, and we plan on adding more features in the weeks and months to come.

Importing existing docs

The other side of readthedocs.org is hosting the docs you’ve already built. Simply provide us with the clone URL to your repo, we’ll pull your code, extract your docs, and build them! We make available a post-commit webhook that can be configured to update the docs on our site whenever you commit to your repo, effectively letting you ‘set it and forget it’.