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 >= 4.5.0
- sphinx_rtd_theme >= 1.0.0
- beautifulsoup4 >= 4.6.0
- antlr4-python3-runtime >= 4.7.1 & <= 4.9.3
- 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).
You can check the dependencies using the doc/tools/coqrst/checkdeps.py
script.
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).
The current documentation targets are:
-
make refman-html
Build the HTML reference manual on_build/default/doc/refman-html
-
make refman-pdf
Build the PDF reference manual on_build/default/doc/refman-pdf
-
make stdlib-html
Build the documentation for Coq's standard library_build/default/doc/stdlib/html
-
make apidoc
Build the documentation for Coq's standard library_build/default/_doc/_html
To build the Sphinx documentation without stopping at the first
warning, 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" make refman-html
Note that inspecting local copies of the docs may behave in unexpected ways if
opening the sources with a browser (eg with firefox _build/default/doc/refman-html/index.html
). In order to avoid this, either
inspect the version generated by the CI or run a local server, for example
with:
cd _build/default/doc/refman-html/ && python3 -m http.server
The produced documents are stored in the described directories above, you can install them just by copying the contents to the desired directory.
In the future, the coq-doc
and coq-stdlib
opam packages will
install the documentation automatically.