Alternate Domains¶

Read the Docs supports a number of custom domains for your convenience. Shorter urls make everyone happy, and we like making people happy!

Subdomain Support¶

Every project has a subdomain that is available to serve it’s documentation. If you go to <slug>.readthedocs.org, it should show you the latest version of documentation. A good example is http://pip.readthedocs.org

Note

If you have an old project that has an underscore (_) in the name, it will use a subdomain with a hypen (-). RFC 1035 has more information on valid subdomains.

CNAME Support¶

If you have your own domain, you can still host with us. If you point a CNAME record in your DNS to the subdomain for your project, it should magically serve your latest documentation on the custom domain. Using pip as another example, http://www.pip-installer.org resolves, but is hosted on our infrastructure.

As an example, fabric’s dig record looks like this:

-> dig docs.fabfile.org
...
;; ANSWER SECTION:
docs.fabfile.org.   7200    IN  CNAME   fabric-docs.readthedocs.org.

CNAME SSL¶

We don’t support SSL for CNAMEs on our side, but you can enable support if you have your own server. SSL requires having a secret key, and if we hosted the key for you, it would no longer be secret.

To enable SSL:

Have a server listening on 443 that you control
Add a domain that you wish to point at Read the Docs
Enable proxying to us, with a custom X-RTD-SLUG header

An example nginx configuration for pip would look like:

 server {
     server_name docs.pip-installer.org;
     location / {
         proxy_pass http://pip.readthedocs.org:80;
         proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
         proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto http;
         proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
         proxy_set_header X-Scheme $scheme;
         proxy_set_header X-RTD-SLUG pip;
         proxy_connect_timeout 10s;
         proxy_read_timeout 20s;
     }
 }

rtfd.org¶

You can also use rtfd.org as a short URL for Read the Docs. For example, http://pip.rtfd.org redirects to its documentation page. Any use of rtfd.org will simply be redirected to readthedocs.org.