Introducing Host The Docs

A month or so ago I created Host the Docs, and it’s been quietly running at work some success, so I figure it’s time to talk about it. The code is on GitHub at https://github.com/rgalanakis/hostthedocs, and here’s a description from the readme:

Host the Docs is a simple way to host static code documentation. Its main use is as a self-hosted server for your organization’s private documentation. Better alternatives are available for open source projects, such as Read the Docs or Github Pages.

Host the Docs was created after a long day of banging my head against the wall trying to get Read the Docs set up with private GitHub repositories, and having helped develop a plugin to get it to work with Perforce previously. What the world needed was a way to easily host documentation from several projects, from any source or language or SCM.

Seriously, let other people generate their own docs, I just want to Host the Docs!

It’s super easy to get set up, and requires no database. You can even just serve everything through Flask, if you don’t want to set up a webserver like Apache or nginx. It’s pretty well tested and configurable and thoroughly documented. We had it running on a new Linux VM in just a few minutes, and use it to host HTML documentation for Python and C# projects (we used Sphinx to generate the Python docs and Doxygen for C#).

I encourage you to try it out if you are interested in painless documentation hosting! I’m also very open to fixes/changes/pull requests, as long as it doesn’t overcomplicate things.