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Source documentation

Overview

The FreeCAD source code is commented to allow automatic programming documentation generation using Doxygen, a popular source code documentation system. Doxygen can document both the C++ and Python parts of FreeCAD, resulting in HTML pages with hyperlinks to each documented function and class.

The documentation is hosted online at the FreeCAD API website. Please note that this documentation may not always be up to date; if you need more details, download FreeCAD's latest source code and compile the documentation yourself. If you have pressing questions about the code please ask in the developer section of the FreeCAD forum.

Compiling the API documentation follows the same general steps as compiling the FreeCAD executable, as indicated in the Compile on Linux page.

General workflow to compile FreeCAD's programming documentation. The Doxygen and Graphviz packages must be in the system, as well as the FreeCAD source code itself. CMake configures the system so that with a single make instruction the documentation for the the entire project is compiled into many HTML files with diagrams.

Build source documentation

Complete documentation

If you have Doxygen installed, it is very easy to build the documentation. Also install Graphviz to be able to produce diagrams showing the relationships between different classes and libraries in the FreeCAD code. Graphviz is also used by FreeCAD's dependency graph to show the relationships between different objects.

sudo apt install doxygen graphviz

Then follow the same steps you would do to compile FreeCAD, as described on the compile on Linux page, and summarized here for convenience.

  • Get the source code of FreeCAD and place it in its own directory freecad-source.
  • Create another directory freecad-build in which you will compile FreeCAD and its documentation.
  • Configure the sources with cmake, making sure you indicate the source directory, and specify the required options for your build.
  • Trigger the creation of the documentation using make.
git clone https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD.git freecad-source
mkdir freecad-build
cd freecad-build
cmake -DBUILD_QT5=ON -DPYTHON_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/python3 ../freecad-source

While you are inside the build directory issue the following instruction to create only the documentation.

make -j$(nproc --ignore=2) DevDoc
``` As mentioned in [compiling (speeding up)](Compiling_(Speeding_up).md), the  
```python
freecad-build/doc/SourceDocu/html/

The point of entrance to the documentation is the

xdg-open freecad-build/doc/SourceDocu/html/index.html

The DevDoc target will generate a significant amount of data, around 5 GB of new files, particularly due to the diagrams created by Graphviz.

Reduced documentation

The complete documentation uses around 3Gb of disk space. An alternative, smaller version of the documentation which takes only around 600 MB can be generated with a different target. This is the version displayed on the FreeCAD API website.

make -j$(nproc --ignore=2) WebDoc

The documentation on the FreeCAD API website is produced automatically from https://github.com/FreeCAD/SourceDoc . Anyone can rebuild it and submit a pull request:

  • Fork the repo at https://github.com/FreeCAD/SourceDoc
  • on your machine: clone the FreeCAD code (if you haven't yet), create a build dir for the doc, and clone the above SourceDoc repo inside. That SourceDoc will be updated when you rebuild the doc, and you'll be able to commit & push the results afterwards:
git clone https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD
cd FreeCAD
mkdir build
cd build
mkdir -p doc/SourceDocu/html
cd doc/SourceDocu/html
git clone your-fork-url
cd ../../..
cmake -DBUILD_QT5=ON -DPYTHON_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/python3 ..
make WebDoc
cd doc/SourceDocu/html
git commit
git push
  • Go to your fork online, and create a pull request.

Other versions

FreeCAD 0.19 development documentation built by qingfeng.xia.

Integrate Coin3D documentation

On Unix systems it is possible to link Coin3D source documentation with FreeCAD's. This allows for easier navigation and complete inheritance diagrams for Coin derived classes.

  • Install the libcoin-doc, libcoin80-doc, or similarly named package.
  • Unpack the archive coin.tar.gz located in /usr/share/doc/libcoin-doc/html; the files may be already unpacked in your system.
  • Generate again the source documentation.

If you don't install the documentation package for Coin, the links will be generated to access the online documentation at BitBucket. This will happen if a Doxygen tag file can be downloaded at configure time with wget.

Using Doxygen

See the Doxygen page for an extensive explanation on how to comment C++ and Python source code so that it can be processed by Doxygen to automatically create the documentation.

Essentially, a comment block, starting with

/**
 * Returns the name of the workbench object.
 */
std::string name() const;

/**
 * Set the name to the workbench object.
 */
void setName(const std::string&);

/// remove the added TaskWatcher
void removeTaskWatcher(void);

documentation index > [Developer Documentation](Category_Developer Documentation.md) > Source documentation