The story and tech of Read the Docs

The story and tech of Read the Docs Eric Holscher http://ericholscher.com Djangocon 2011

What this talk is» Talk about the history of Read the Docs» Technology Involved» Interesting outcomes of openness» Lessons learned

Who am I» I come from Django» Work at Urban Airship» Like automating systems

Why I’m here» Feedback» Ideas» Hopefully you’ll learn something too!» Shameless self-promotion

The story

2010 Django Dash

Charles LeiferBobby Grace (Design) Me

Doc Hosting Sucks» packages.python.org» Github Pages» Your own janky cronjobs

Sphinx» Standard documentation tool for python» Uses reStructured Text

Had a workable site in 48 hours

Fully Open Source

Fully Open Source» github.com/rtfd/readthedocs.org» github.com/ericholscher/chef-django-example» ericholscher.com/tag/chef-series/

Officially Hosted» Celery» Fabric» Nose, py.test» Virtualenv, Pip» Django CMS» Django Grapelli/Floppyforms/Sentry» mod_wsgi (woo!)

What makes it tick

Features

Git, Hg, Bzr, Svn

Post commit hooks

Custom Theme

Full-text search

Tags & Branches = Versions

PDF Generation

Virtualenvs

rtfd.org

Subdomains

CNAME Support

Cname Support» Request for docs.fabﬁle.org» docs.fabﬁle.org -> fabric.readthedocs.org» In middleware, resolve CNAME and determine docs to serve.» Cache it.

Architecture +-----------+ | | +-----| Varnish |------+ | +-----------+ | | | +---------+ +---------++-------------+ | | | | +--------------+| |-----| Nginx | | Nginx |----| || File | +---------+ +---------+ | File || System | | | | System |+-------------+ +---------+ +--------+ +---------+ +--------------+ | | | | | | | | | | | +---------|Gunicorn |--|Postgres|--|Gunicorn |--------+ | | +---------+ +--------+ +---------+ | | | | | | | | +------------------+ | | | | | +---------------------| Build Server |-------------------+ | | +------------------+

Haystack & Solr

Nagios & Munin

Upstart

REST API

CoffeeScript

Open Source Outcomes

Patches

Known architecture information

Slow Loris

People Writing Docs

Lessons

Think about your URLs. Really hard.

Lay your project out sanely

Write tests!

Build around a standard tool

Passing data through systems is hard

Serving static ﬁles is annoying

Log. Everything.

Promote (Hi!)

Find a designer!

Follow the Unix Philosophy

Have a mission

Thanks

Revsys

Mozilla

Pyladies

Questions?» readthedocs.org / rtfd.org» #readthedocs on Freenode» github.com/rtfd/readthedocs.org» eric@ericholscher.com

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The story and tech of Read the Docs

by ericholscher on Sep 06, 2011

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The story and tech of Read the Docs — Presentation Transcript