Versioned and Integrated Documentation (Read the Docs Clone)

Description including problem, use cases, benefits, and/or goals

Read the Docs has been a game-changer in making useful documentation accessible. Their support for auto-building and support for multiple versions has made it easier than ever for developers to keep their documentation complete and up-to-date.

Proposal

My proposal is to build Read the Docs (or similar) functionality directly into GitLab to help further the unifying experience GitLab offers.

There are several limitations that I think GitLab could improve on to make the documentation experience even better:

• With Read the Docs, the documentation is hosted on a completely separate site than the code base. I propose an augmented version of the wiki that allows for building documentation from the repository, essentially a Read the Docs clone. This has the benefit of having the documentation readily available in the same location as the code itself.

• With Read the Docs, it is difficult to host on-premise documentation. Not every project or utility we build is public, but it would still be nice to have documentation available for our team.

Links / references

• https://readthedocs.org/
• https://github.com/rtfd/readthedocs.org

Technologies behind RTD

• http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/stable/
• https://github.com/rtfd/recommonmark

~"feature proposal"