Upload pre-built docs

[marscher]

I wonder if that would be possible? Would be extremely useful, since I'm building and deploying my packages with travis, and could perform the doc building also during this runs.

You may ask why this is necessary, since its not obvious that I can not use your build environment for documentation. I've to convert some ipython notebooks with cabal to rst and include them in my sphinx build. This aint possible on RTD and probably will never be.

Thanks for your effort!

Front conversations

[agjohnson]

We agree this would be an awesome feature, we've already talked about how this might work and it's vaguely on our roadmap already.

[marscher]

what is the status of APIv2.1?

[felixc]

👍 to this. I could really use a "dumb file upload" API, where I can just provide a zip/tar/whatever of HTML+CSS files, along with some basic metadata like what version it's for.

[thedillonb]

I'm also very interested in this. Since I try to generate as much documentation via the code comments it would be very easy to, during CI, generate the pages, and upload to RTD - without the need for checking-in these generated files!

[embray]

IIRC this used to work, or at least, there was a file upload option but it was removed?

What needs to be done to overcome the original problems with this feature? It would be nice to have again, and could even allow us to offload some build overhead from RTD.

[marscher]

Maybe it has been removed, so people don't misuse rtfd as a free hosting service?

[agjohnson]

I believe it was once a feature of RTD, but it was removed. We'd like to have this supported with an overhaul of the API -- a task we haven't added to our roadmap yet.

The more pressing issue we need to take a stance on is what are we accepting via html upload. RTD doesn't aim to be just a file host -- you could output and host documentation almost anywhere on the internet. Our goal is making the documentation authoring and viewing experience great, with Sphinx being our primary focus. The documentation experience would go south if we just took any old html and hosted it. We don't have the resources or community support to improve the experience of al the various documentation output folks use.

We're still shaping our opinion here, but we look to support some form of integration with externally built sphinx documentation, via some local command wrappers that you could run on external CI services/etc. We don't have an ETA on when we might drop that on our roadmap yet, but it is on our radar.

[embray]

It seems the biggest issue is then just ensuring a certain level of quality, and now allowing spam and or non-docs to be hosted. Perhaps the feature could be enabled only for validated users. Or maybe even paying (?) users? I can see how it would be difficult to handle that resource-wise though.

[luketunmer]

This feature would be great, even it was turned off on the public RTD server, but available for corporate-hosted ones in which the concerns over hosting generic HTML would not be an issue. The builds of our repos are just to contorted to expect a RTD server to check out and build, whereas our Jenkins CI server does all of that already.

[mistercrunch]

I can't get RTD to compile my project because of external dependencies that require OS modules. I'd love to be able to upload my compiled docs.

Since this issue isn't moving I have to rely on pythonhosted and kill the RTD entry for my project, loosing some SEO love....