Generating Documentation¶

Prerequisites¶

Documentation in Dune is done courtesy of the odoc tool. Therefore, to generate documentation in Dune, you will need to install this tool. This should be done with opam:

$ opam install odoc

Writing Documentation¶

Documentation comments will be automatically extracted from your OCaml source files following the syntax described in the section Text formatting of the OCaml manual.

Additional documentation pages may be attached to a package using the documentation stanza.

Building Documentation¶

To generate documentation using the @doc alias, all that’s required to is to build this alias:

$ dune build @doc

An index page containing links to all the opam packages in your project can be found in:

$ open _build/default/_doc/_html/index.html

Documentation for private libraries may also be built with @doc-private:

$ dune build @doc-private

But these libraries will not be in the main HTML listing above, since they don’t belong to any particular package, but the generated HTML will still be found in _build/default/_doc/_html/<library>.

Documentation Stanza: Examples¶

The documentation stanza will attach all the .mld files in the current directory in a project with a single package.

(documentation)

This stanza will attach three .mld files to package foo. The .mld files should be named foo.mld, bar.mld, and baz.mld

(documentation
 (package foo)
  (mld_files foo bar baz))

This stanza will attach all .mld files to the inferred package, excluding wip.mld, in the current directory:

(documentation
 (mld_files :standard \ wip))

All .mld files attached to a package will be included in the generated .install file for that package. They’ll be installed by opam.

Package Entry Page¶

The index.mld file (specified as index in mld_files) is treated specially by Dune. This will be the file used to generate the entry page for the package, linked from the main package listing.

To generate pleasant documentation, we recommend writing an index.mld file with at least short description of your package and possibly some examples.

If you do not write your own index.mld file, Dune will generate one with the entry modules for your package. But this generated file will not be installed.

Passing Options to `odoc`¶

(env
 (<profile>
  (odoc <optional-fields>)))

See env for more details on the (env ...) stanza. <optional-fields> are:

(warnings <mode>) specifies how warnings should be handled. <mode> can be: fatal or nonfatal. The default value is nonfatal. This field is available since Dune 2.4.0 and requires odoc 1.5.0.

Local Documentation Search Using Sherlodoc¶

If Sherlodoc is installed, generated HTML documentation will include a search bar. It supports search by name, documentation and fuzzy type search.

In can be installed with:

$ opam install sherlodoc