Bad Sphinx configuration path causes uncaught error while updating the build through API

[agjohnson]

This came from a user support question. The user noted a build that did not finish and seemed to hang. Digging into the issue, the logs looked odd. I noticed the error:

"Object of type PosixPath is not JSON serializable"

This was raised as the build instance was being updated at our API, not inside the build process. Because the API was not updated, the build was never marked as finished, and so was left to timeout.

We weren't having luck looking into this too deeply, but I just noticed today that the Sphinx configuration value in the build's RTD config was quite odd:

{
  "builder": "sphinx",
  "configuration": "../../../../../../../../conf.py",
  "fail_on_warning": false
}

I was able to use this value to easily reproduce the error:

• https://github.com/readthedocs/test-builds/compare/test-parent-path-error
• https://beta.readthedocs.org/projects/test-builds/builds/21283091/
• And the same error in New Relic: https://onenr.io/08wpY8PvJRO

The error didn't seem to come up in Sentry

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