Official Documentation of Raku

An HTML version of this documentation can be found at https://docs.raku.org/ and also at rakudocs.github.io (which is actually updated more frequently). This is currently the recommended way to consume the documentation.

Docker container

This documentation is also published as the jjmerelo/perl6-doc Docker container. It includes a copy of the web published on port 3000, so you can run it with:

docker run --rm -it -p 3000:3000 jjmerelo/perl6-doc

or

docker run --rm -it -p 31415:3000 jjmerelo/perl6-doc

in case you want it published somewhere else. You can direct your browser to http://localhost:3000 (or 31415, as the case may be).

README in other languages

• README in Chinese
• README in Dutch
• README in French
• README in German
• README in Italian
• README in Japanese
• README in Portuguese
• README in Spanish

Install rakudoc

Please see https://github.com/Raku/rakudoc for the command line tool for viewing the documentation.

Building the HTML documentation

Note: If you just want a copy of the build HTML site and don't want to deal with the build yourself, you can clone it from here: https://github.com/rakudocs/rakudocs.github.io.

The documentation can be rendered to static HTML pages and/or served in a local web site. This process involves creating a cache of precompiled documents, so that generation after the first time is sped up.

These are the prerequisites you need to install to generate documentation.

• perl 5.20 or later.
• node 10 or later.
• graphviz.
• Documentable.

Please follow these instructions (in Ubuntu) to install them:

sudo apt install perl graphviz # perl not installed by default in 18.04
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_12.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs
cpanm --installdeps .
zef install --deps-only . ; # from inside this checkout

You can install perl and node any way you want, including version managers, as long as they're available to run from the command line.

This should install all needed requisites, now you can clone this repository and start building process:

git clone https://github.com/Raku/doc.git # clone the repo
cd doc # move to the clone of the repo
# Generate CSS and JS, install highlighting modules, build cache and pages
make html

You need to do this only the first time to build the cache. When there's some change in the source (done by yourself or pulled from the repo),

make update-html

will re-generate only affected pages.

Documentation will be generated in the html subdirectory. You can use it pointing any static web server at that directory, or use the development server based on Mojolicious using

make run

This will serve the documentation in port 3000.

Building the EPUB and/or the "single big page HTML" documentation

The documentation can also be generated in the EPUB format as well as the "single big page HTML" format. Please note that some features (e.g. inherited methods and type graph in the Types section, or syntax highlighting of the code examples) are not (yet) available in these formats.

These are the prerequisites you need to install:

• Pod::To::BigPage 0.5.2 or later.
• Pandoc (EPUB only).

You can follow these instructions to install them on Ubuntu or Debian:

zef install "Pod::To::BigPage:ver<0.5.2+>"
sudo apt install pandoc     # only if you want to generate EPUB

Now that you have the dependencies installed, clone this repository and generate the EPUB or "single big page HTML" documentation:

git clone https://github.com/Raku/doc.git # clone this repo
cd doc      # enter the cloned repo
make epub           # for the EPUB format,
                    # for the "single big page HTML" format use `make bigpage` instead

The generated EPUB output you will find in the raku.epub file in the root of the repository and the generated "single big page HTML" output in html/raku.html.

nginx configuration

Latest version of the generated documentation consists only of static HTML pages. All pages are generated with .html at the end; however, most internal links don't use that suffix. Most web servers (for instance, the one that serves with GitHub pages) will add it automatically for you. A bare server will not. This is what you have to add to the configuration to make it work:

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ $uri.html /404.html;
    }

This will rewrite the URLs for you. Equivalent configuration might have to be made in other server applications.

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Help Wanted!

Raku is not a small language, and documenting it and maintaining that documentation takes a lot of effort. Any help is appreciated.

Here are some ways to help us:

• Add missing documentation for classes, roles, methods or operators.
• Add usage examples to existing documentation.
• Proofread and correct the documentation.
• Tell us about missing documentation by opening issues on Github.
• Do a git grep TODO in this repository, and replace the TODO items by actual documentation.

Issues page has a list of current issues and documentation parts that are known to be missing and the CONTRIBUTING document explains briefly how to get started contributing documentation.

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Some notes:

Q: Why aren't you embedding the docs in the CORE sources?
A: Several reasons:

1. This documentation is intended to be universal with respect to a given version of the specification, and not necessarily tied to any specific Raku implementation.
2. Implementations' handling of embedded Pod is still a bit uneven; this avoids potential runtime impacts.
3. A separate repo in the Raku Github account invites more potential contributors and editors.

Q: Should I include methods from superclasses or roles?
A: No. The HTML version already includes methods from superclasses and roles.

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Vision

I want p6doc and docs.raku.org to become the No. 1 resource to consult when you want to know something about a Raku feature, be it from the language, or built-in types and routines. I want it to be useful to every Raku programmer.

-- moritz

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ENV VARS

• P6_DOC_TEST_VERBOSE to a true value to display verbose messages during test suite run. Helpful when debugging failing test suite.
• P6_DOC_TEST_FUDGE fudges skip-test code examples as TODO in xt/examples-compilation.t test.

UPDATES

Updates are done for the time being by hand. This probably needs improvement.

LICENSE

The code in this repository is available under the Artistic License 2.0 as published by The Perl Foundation. See the LICENSE file for the full text.

This repository also contains code authored by third parties that may be licensed under a different license. Such files indicate the copyright and license terms at the top of the file. Currently these include:

• jQuery and jQuery UI libraries: Copyright 2015 jQuery Foundation and other contributors; MIT License
• jQuery Cookie plugin: Copyright 2006, 2015 Klaus Hartl & Fagner Brack; MIT License
• Examples from Stack Overflow; MIT License (ref #1 for 1f7cc4e)
• Table sorter plugin from https://github.com/christianbach/tablesorter; MIT License