Password protect readthedocs.org documentation

Question

I have a documentation managed on readthedocs.org. Is there a way to password protect or at least make our documentation available only for some of our customers?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, docs hosted on Read The Docs cannot be password-protected.

The best you can do (as of now) is to set your documentation to "Private" which will show users a 404 when they navigate to your docs from the www.readthedocs.org website. However, this is extremely weak security as anyone with the actual url can still view your documentation.

From their documentation:

With a URL to view the actual documentation, even private docs are viewable. This is because our architecture doesn’t do any logic on documentation display, to increase availability.

However, you could just host the Sphinx generated documentation yourself, and that you could password protect. I would say that is definitely your best bet!

Read the Docs is really just a convenience hosting service, you can still host your documentation elsewhere, and then easily password protect it just like you would password protect anything else.

Update

Btw, the easiest way to do that is to just generate generate static .html files - using make html from the root folder. Put those HTML files up on an internally hosted web server and you're good :)