The Coq documentation includes
- A Reference Manual
- A document presenting the Coq standard library
The documentation of the latest released version is available on the Coq web site at coq.inria.fr/documentation.
Additionally, you can view the reference manual for the development version at https://coq.github.io/doc/master/refman/, and the documentation of the standard library for the development version at https://coq.github.io/doc/master/stdlib/.
The reference manual is written is reStructuredText and compiled
using Sphinx. See sphinx/README.rst
to learn more about the format that is used.
The documentation for the standard library is generated from
the .v
source files using coqdoc.
To produce the complete documentation in HTML, you will need Coq dependencies
listed in INSTALL.md
. Additionally, the Sphinx-based
reference manual requires Python 3, and the following Python packages:
- sphinx >= 3.0.2
- sphinx_rtd_theme >= 0.4.3
- beautifulsoup4 >= 4.0.6
- antlr4-python3-runtime >= 4.7.1
- pexpect >= 4.2.1
- sphinxcontrib-bibtex >= 0.4.2
To install them, you should first install pip and setuptools (for instance,
with apt install python3-pip python3-setuptools
on Debian / Ubuntu) then run:
pip3 install sphinx sphinx_rtd_theme beautifulsoup4 \
antlr4-python3-runtime==4.7.1 pexpect sphinxcontrib-bibtex
Nix users should get the correct development environment to build the
HTML documentation from Coq's default.nix
(note this
doesn't include the LaTeX packages needed to build the full documentation).
To produce the documentation in PDF and PostScript formats, the following additional tools are required:
- latex (latex2e)
- pdflatex
- dvips
- makeindex
- xelatex
- latexmk
All of them are part of the TexLive distribution. E.g. on Debian / Ubuntu, install them with:
apt install texlive-full
Or if you want to use less disk space:
apt install texlive-latex-extra texlive-fonts-recommended texlive-xetex \
latexmk fonts-freefont-otf
Make sure that the locale is configured on your platform so that Python encodes
printed messages with utf-8 rather than generating runtime exceptions
for non-ascii characters. The .UTF-8
in export LANG=C.UTF-8
sets UTF-8 encoding.
The C
can be replaced with any supported language code. You can set the default
for a Docker build with ENV LANG C.UTF-8
. (Python may look at other
environment variables to determine the locale; see the
Python documentation).
To produce all documentation about Coq in all formats, just run:
./configure # (if you hadn't already)
make doc
Alternatively, you can use some specific targets:
-
make doc-ps
to produce all PostScript documents -
make doc-pdf
to produce all PDF documents -
make doc-html
to produce all HTML documents -
make refman
to produce the HTML and PDF versions of the reference manual -
make refman-{html,pdf}
to produce only one format of the reference manual -
make doc-stdlib
to produce all formats of the Coq standard library
Also note the -with-doc yes
option of ./configure
to enable the
build of the documentation as part of the default make target.
To build the Sphinx documentation without stopping at the first
warning with the legacy Makefile, set SPHINXWARNERROR
to 0 as such:
SPHINXWARNERROR=0 make refman-html
To do the same with the Dune build system, change the value of the
SPHINXWARNOPT
variable (default is -W
). The following will build
the Sphinx documentation without stopping at the first warning, and
store all the warnings in the file /tmp/warn.log
:
SPHINXWARNOPT="-w/tmp/warn.log" dune build @refman-html
To install all produced documents, do:
make install-doc
This will install the documentation in /usr/share/doc/coq
unless you
specify another value through the -docdir
option of ./configure
or
the DOCDIR
environment variable. Note that DOCDIR
controls the
root of the documentation, that is to say, in the example above, the
root is /usr/share/doc
.