We are announcing the deprecation of projects using Sphinx or MkDocs without an explicit configuration in their .readthedocs.yaml configuration file.

If you are using Sphinx or MkDocs in your project, and your .readthedocs.yaml configuration file doesn't contain a sphinx.configuration or mkdocs.configuration key, make sure to add it. For example, for a Sphinx project, your configuration file should look like this:

version: 2
sphinx:
  # Path to your Sphinx configuration file.
  configuration: docs/conf.py

For a MkDocs project, your configuration file should look like this:

version: 2
mkdocs:
  # Path to your MkDocs configuration file.
  configuration: mkdocs.yml

We used to automatically try to find the configuration file for your project, but in order to make builds more explicit and predictable, we are deprecating this behavior. This will also allows us to better support projects that don't use Sphinx or MkDocs in the near future.

If you are using the build.commands feature, you don't need to make any changes, as the sphinx and mkdocs options are not required when using build.commands.

Deprecation timeline

We will disallow building projects using Sphinx or MkDocs without an explicit Sphinx or MkDocs configuration in their configuration file on the following dates:

• Monday, January 6, 2025: Temporarily disallow building projects for 12 hours, from 00:01 PST to 11:59 PST.
• Monday, January 13, 2025:Temporarily disallow building projects for 24 hours, from 00:01 PST to 23:59 PST.
• Monday, January 20, 2025: Permanently disallow building projects.