First, you should check out the Builds tab of your project. That records all of the build attempts that RTD has made to build your project. If you see modules missing, you should enable the virtualenv feature, which will install your project into a virtualenv. If you are still seeing missing dependencies, you can install them with a pip requirements file in your project settings.
If you are still seeing errors because of C library dependencies, please see the below section about that.
No. Whitelisting has been removed as a concept in Read the Docs. You should have access to all of the features already.
When RTD builds your project, it sets the READTHEDOCS environment variable to the string True. So within your Sphinx’s conf.py file, you can vary the behavior based on this. For example:
import os
on_rtd = os.environ.get('READTHEDOCS', None) == 'True'
if on_rtd:
html_theme = 'default'
else:
html_theme = 'nature'
The READTHEDOCS variable is also available in the Sphinx build environment, and will be set to True when building on RTD:
{% if READTHEDOCS %}
Woo
{% endif %}
Note
Another use case for this is when you have a module with a C extension.
This happens because our build system doesn’t have the dependencies for building your project. This happens with things like libevent and mysql, and other python things that depend on C libraries. We can’t support installing random C binaries on our system, so there is another way to fix these imports.
You can mock out the imports for these modules in your conf.py with the following snippet:
import sys
class Mock(object):
def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
pass
def __call__(self, *args, **kwargs):
return Mock()
@classmethod
def __getattr__(cls, name):
if name in ('__file__', '__path__'):
return '/dev/null'
elif name[0] == name[0].upper():
mockType = type(name, (), {})
mockType.__module__ = __name__
return mockType
else:
return Mock()
MOCK_MODULES = ['pygtk', 'gtk', 'gobject', 'argparse']
for mod_name in MOCK_MODULES:
sys.modules[mod_name] = Mock()
Of course, replacing MOCK_MODULES with the modules that you want to mock out.
Read the Docs will crawl your project looking for a conf.py. Where it finds the conf.py, it will run sphinx-build in that directory. So as long as you only have one set of sphinx documentation in your project, it should Just Work.
We think that our theme is badass, and better than the default for many reasons. Some people don’t like change though :), so there is a hack that will let you keep using the default theme. If you set the html_style variable in your conf.py, it should default to using the default theme. The value of this doesn’t matter, and can be set to /default.css for default behavior.
Image scaling in docutils depends on PIL. PIL is installed in the system that RTD runs on. However, if you are using the virtualenv building option, you will likely need to include PIL in your requirements for your project.
RTD doesn’t have explicit support for this. That said, a tool like Disqus can be used for this purpose on RTD.
This is something that has been long planned. In fact, we have a language string in the URLs! However, it isn’t currently modeled and supported in the code base. However, you can specify the conf.py file to use for a specific version of the documentation. So, you can create a project for each language of documentation, and do it that way. You can then CNAME different domains on your docs to them. Requests does something like this with it’s translations: