Config: Add explicit options to exclude a project from search

[benjaoming]

Some documentation projects want to have their own search in place of server side search. This means that none of the search features should be active on the project. Some projects can want a mix of this.

This might be a bit complicated, but there are several cases to cover for:

• a) Project wants to disable in-doc searching (but keep the project indexed so it appears in Dashboard searches and global searches)
• b) Project wants to exclude itself from dashboard searches (but keep in-doc search and global search)
• c) Project wants to exclude itself from global searches (but keep in-doc search and dashboard search) (only valid for community projects)
• d) Project wants to disable in-doc search and excluded from global search and dashboard search

Only d) would benefit from disabling indexing, but it's not necessary given that there are explicit options for in-doc, dashboard and global search inclusion.

Currently, we can remove all pages from search indexing: search.ignore: all is perhaps better than search.ignore: '*'.. but it doesn't really matter, since this does not work for a), b) nor c).

Here's a rough sketch of how that could look:

search:
   include: # unchanged
   exclude: all # new option 'all' in place of '*'
   scopes:
       indoc: disable  # default: enable. The meaning of 'disable' is also to remove extensions to the documentation tool, Sphinx or MkDocs.
       global: disable  # default: enable
       dashboard: disable  # default: enable

[benjaoming]

(this issue is added to summarize how a potential less-hackish solution to a support issue could be fixed)

[stsewd]

a) Project wants to disable in-doc searching (but keep the project indexed so it appears in Dashboard searches and global searches)

We have a feature flag for this, and this is only relevant for sphinx projects, we inject our custom search there by default. For mkdocs and docs built with build.commands, we don't inject our custom search, users need to do that themselves (this can be by installing our sphinx search extension).

b) Project wants to exclude itself from dashboard searches (but keep in-doc search and global search)

Not sure if I understand this one, is this "dashboard search" https://readthedocs.org/search/?q=project:docs%20 you are referring to?

[benjaoming]

I've been confused since I received that question about disabling server side search on MkDocs. I get now that it doesn't exist and you've done tonnes of work to plan it for MkDocs 👍

We have a feature flag for this, and this is only relevant for sphinx projects

I hope it will be relevant to have configuration for this. IIRC, we want to stop using feature flags for configuration.

Not sure if I understand this one, is this "dashboard search"

Maybe there's another term? Dashboard search is searches performed by the user while logged in on their own projects or projects that they have special access to on Read the Docs 4 Business.

I added search.scopes in the configuration to be able to scale configuration per scope. This could all be designed in more detail.

[humitos]

This issue seems related to #7217

I think that users don't really want to disable the "server side search", what they want to disable is the "integration Read the Docs injects on their documentation and go back to the doctool original search". Now, that can be done by disabling the search addon.

I don't see too much value on disabling them from dashboard search, so I don't think we need a config for that. In any case, feel free to re-open if you consider.