Read The Docs
Read The Docs is a free and open-source tool created in Python to help developers easily build documentation for software projects using Sphinx, MkDocs and other static site generators. It provides continuous integration, web hosting for documentation, versioning and search funct
documentation
sphinx
mkdocs
python
open-source
Read The Docs: Free Open-Source Documentation Tool
Read The Docs is a free and open-source tool created in Python to help developers easily build documentation for software projects using Sphinx, MkDocs and other static site generators. It provides continuous integration, web hosting for documentation, versioning and search functionality.
What is Read The Docs?
Read The Docs is an open source platform for software documentation, allowing developers to easily create, host and manage documentation for their open source projects. It supports building documentation with Sphinx for Python projects, MkDocs for Markdown-based projects, and other static site generators.
Some key features of Read The Docs include:
- Free hosting for open source project documentation
- Continuous integration to build and publish new versions of docs with each code change
- Configurable documentation versions mapped to software releases
- Full text search across documentation
- Responsive design supporting phones to desktops
- Analytics on documentation readers and traffic sources
- Extensive theming and markup flexibility
By handling much of the tooling and infrastructure around docs, Read The Docs enables developers to focus on creating great documentation. It has become widely adopted by the open source community with over 150,000 projects, including globally popular projects like Python, Django, Ansible, and many more.
Overall, Read The Docs makes it dramatically easier for development teams to publish high quality, easy to find documentation for their software projects. Its capabilities, community and integration with GitHub and other code repositories have led it to become a standard tool in the open source documentation ecosystem.
Read The Docs Features
Features
- Continuous integration for documentation
- Web hosting for documentation
- Version control for documentation
- Search across documentation
- Support for Sphinx, MkDocs and other static site generators
Pricing
- Free
- Open Source
Pros
Free and open source
Easy to set up
Integrates seamlessly with GitHub, Bitbucket etc
Large community support
Good documentation and tutorials available
Cons
Limited customization compared to self-hosted options
No native WYSIWYG editor
Search can be slow for large documentation sets
Official Links
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