Read the Docs website

This repository contains the site content and static assets used to build the Read the Docs website. You can view this site at https://about.readthedocs.com

This repository includes:

A Pelican project for our site content

This includes our site content as well as our blog.

A Pelican theme and series of templates

The Pelican configuration uses the theme readthedocs_theme, which extends the Pelican simple theme underneath by default. Webpack builds assets directly into the theme path.

A Semantic UI theme specifically for marketing content

This should mostly be a stock experience, but with some customization for marketing content.

Usage

Setting up your environment

This package uses [uv](https://github.com/astral-sh/uv) to manage Python dependencies and CSS and JS assets are built using a number of Node dependencies.

You will need the following requirements:

• Node.js version 14
• Python version 3.10 (any release >=3.6 works)
• uv (Use asdf or see https://github.com/astral-sh/uv for installation instructions)

Using asdf is recommended but optional. The asdf commands below will install all system level dependencies for you.

$ cp .tool-versions-example .tool-versions
$ asdf install
$ asdf reshim

With the correct system dependencies configured, either with asdf or manually, you can install all package level dependencies with:

$ uv sync
$ npm install

Local development and authoring

Webpack handles all of the building of assets, running the development web server, and hot reload for the site CSS, JavaScript, Pelican templates, and Pelican content. This is the best way to make change to this repository.

All you need to execute locally is:

$ npm run dev

This will start an auto reloading web server. You can view the built site at:

http://localhost:8080/

Any changes to the theme static assets, page/post Markdown source, or our theme templates will reload the page in the browser. Alternatively, type rs<Enter> in the Nodemon process to force a Pelican build.

Note

Removing and adding files sometimes is not recognized by Nodemon. You might need to restart the npm run dev command periodically.

Building content only

If you run into issues building CSS or JS, you can work around this temporarily by running Pelican directly and viewing the output locally:

$ npm run build-html
$ firefox output/index.html

You will lose out on all of the nice features of Webpack this way, so it is recommneded to use the standard development flow instead.

Building assets

For every pull request, assets need to be rebuilt, or the pull request check will fail.

To generate production CSS and JavaScript assets:

$ npm run build

This will create all of the necessary files in readthedocs_theme/static/, as well as regenerate all of the site content through Pelican.

Linting and formatting

Similar to other front end projects, and our Python code, we use automatic linting and formatting for styling code to a unified format. For CSS/JS, we use prettier, which is opinionated but mostly makes good code style choices.

Linting is required for every pull request, skipping this step can cause the build to fail if your formatting doesn't match the intended output from prettier.

To run linting checks, which will only report errors:

$ npm run lint

To automatically format code:

$ npm run format

Authoring content

Pages

Pages should be saved under content/pages/. If the pages are heavy in HTML, the source file should simply be an HTML document instead of reST/Markdown. By default, pages should use the readthedocs_theme/templates/page.html template but that can be overridden.

Blog posts

Blog posts should be saved under content/posts/.

Style Guide

Our style is loosely based on the Wikipedia Manual of Style.

• Titles use title case.
• Section headings (h2 and below) use sentence case and tend to be descriptive/substantive beyond a simple noun.