Deploying Zensical on Read the Docs
Zensical is a modern static site generator designed to simplify building and maintaining project documentation. It’s built by the creators of Material for MkDocs and shares the same core design principles and philosophy – batteries included, easy to use, with powerful customization options.
Minimal configuration is required to build an existing Zensical project on Read the Docs:
version: 2
build:
os: ubuntu-24.04
tools:
python: latest
jobs:
# We recommend using a requirements file for reproducible builds.
# This is just a quick example to get started.
# https://docs.readthedocs.io/page/guides/reproducible-builds.html
install:
- pip install zensical
build:
html:
- zensical build
post_build:
- mkdir -p $READTHEDOCS_OUTPUT/html/
- cp --recursive site/* $READTHEDOCS_OUTPUT/html/
Quick start
If you have an existing Zensical project you want to host on Read the Docs, check out our Adding a documentation project guide.
If you’re new to Zensical, check out the official Getting Started guide.
Configuring Zensical and Read the Docs Addons
There are some additional steps you can take to configure your Zensical project to work better with Read the Docs.
Set the canonical URL
A canonical URL allows you to specify the preferred version of a web page to prevent duplicated content.
Set your Zensical site URL to your Read the Docs canonical URL using a Read the Docs environment variable:
[project]
# Note: variable interpolation is not yet supported in Zensical configuration files,
# so you can use the explicit value for now.
site_url = "https://your-project.readthedocs.io/"