readthedocs.org: Sphinx error: master file [..]/checkouts/latest/contents.rst not found

Encountered the same problem here.

I’m using sphinx 2.0.1. The generated structure by sphinx-quickstart command is built into html documentation successfully in my environment, while in readthedocs.org there occurs “contents.rst not found” error.

I finally found it works by adding the following line in conf.py to explicitly assign the master document:

master_doc = 'index'

I guess this issue is caused by the conflicts of the default sphinx version in readthedocs and the local environment.

I just record this solution here in case someone like me will be confused by this issue and have no idea about how to deal with it.

This doesn’t look to be a problem with RTD, so I’m going to close it. The error message states it is looking for a contents.rst, which doesn’t exist. If you don’t specify otherwise, Sphinx’s default master_doc setting is contents. If you’d like to use index instead, you’ll need to create a configuration file. I suggest you first explore http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/1.5.1/tutorial.html as you should be getting the same errors locally, it might be easier to learn Sphinx this way.

Encountered the same problem here.

I’m using sphinx 2.0.1. The generated structure by sphinx-quickstart command is built into html documentation successfully in my environment, while in readthedocs.org there occurs “contents.rst not found” error.

I finally found it works by adding the following line in conf.py to explicitly assign the master document:

master_doc = 'index'

I guess this issue is caused by the conflicts of the default sphinx version in readthedocs and the local environment.

I just record this solution here in case someone like me will be confused by this issue and have no idea about how to deal with it.

Worked for me !! Thanks

You can use a requirements.txt file to use the same version of sphinx you use locally https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/guides/specifying-dependencies.html

You can use a requirements.txt file to use the same version of sphinx you use locally https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/guides/specifying-dependencies.html

Currently, RTD installs the following packages before installing packages from the project requirements file:

python -m pip install --upgrade --cache-dir .cache/pip Pygments==2.3.1 setuptools==41.0.1 docutils==0.14 mock==1.0.1 pillow==5.4.1 alabaster>=0.7,<0.8,!=0.7.5 commonmark==0.8.1 recommonmark==0.5.0 sphinx<2 sphinx-rtd-theme<0.5 readthedocs-sphinx-ext<1.1 

I do not know why they use such old versions (sphinx<2 for example). If I do not set versions in my requirement file, sphinx version will not be updated and I will get the error contents.rst not found. In my opinion, it seems stupid.

I think self-hosted deployments have to define the feature flag default themselves in order to avoid this issue?

Yeah, that’s correct. You can set the default_true and future_default_true atributes to True so it’s aplied to all projects, old and future ones.

btw, we already install the latest sphinx version for new projects (created after Oct 20, 2020)