Official Perl 6 Documentation

An HTML version of this documentation can be found at https://docs.perl6.org/. This is currently the recommended way to consume the documentation.

There is also a command line tool called "p6doc".

(If you are browsing this repository via GitHub, it will not display most files correctly, because this is Perl 6 Pod, and GitHub assumes Perl 5 POD).

README in other languages

README in Chinese.

Install p6doc

This module is available via the Perl 6 module ecosystem. Use

zef install p6doc

to install the binaries and make it available in your binaries execution path.

Use p6doc

With a Rakudo perl6 executable in PATH, try

./bin/p6doc Str

to see the documentation for class Str, or

./bin/p6doc Str.split

to see the documentation for method split in class Str. You can skip the ./bin part if you have installed it via zef. You can also do

p6doc -f slurp

to browse the documentation of standard functions. Depending on your disk speed and Rakudo version, it might take a while.

Building the HTML documentation

Install dependencies by running the following in the checkout directory:

zef --deps-only install .

If you use rakudobrew, also run the following, to update the shims for installed executables:

rakudobrew rehash

In addition to the Perl 6 dependencies, you need to have graphviz installed, which on Debian you can do by running

sudo apt-get install graphviz

To build the documentation web pages, simply run

$ make html

Please note that you will need to have nodejs installed to produce HTML content with the above command, in particular a node executable should be in your PATH.

After the pages have been generated, you can view them on your local computer by starting the included app.pl program:

$ make run

You can then view the examples documentation by pointing your web browser at http://localhost:3000.

You will need at least Mojolicious installed and you will need nodejs to perform highlighting. There are also some additional modules you might need; install them all using

$ cpanm --installdeps .

Help Wanted!

Perl 6 is not a small language, and documenting it 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.

Some notes:

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

This documentation is intended to be universal with respect to a given version of the specification, and not necessarily tied to any specific Perl 6 implementation.
Implementations' handling of embedded POD is still a bit uneven; this avoids potential runtime impacts.
A separate repo in the perl6 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, and the p6doc script will be taught about those as well.

Vision

I want p6doc and doc.perl6.org to become the No. 1 resource to consult when you want to know something about a Perl 6 feature, be it from the language, or built-in types and routines. I want it to be useful to every Perl 6 programmer.

-- moritz

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

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

Kaiepi / doc