Welcome to the Raspberry Pi Documentation

This repository contains the Asciidoc source and the toolchain to build the Raspberry Pi Documentation. For details of how to contribute to the documentation see the CONTRIBUTING.md file.

NOTE: This repository has undergone some recent changes. See our blog post for more details.

Building the Documentation

Instructions on how to checkout the documentation repo, and then install the toolchain needed to convert from Asciidoc to HTML and build the documentation site.

Checking out the Repository

Install git if you don’t already have it, and check out the documentation repo as follows:

$ git clone https://github.com/raspberrypi/documentation.git
$ cd documentation

Installing the Toolchain

On Linux

This works on both regular Debian or Ubuntu Linux — and has been tested in a minimal Docker container — and also under Raspberry Pi OS if you are working from a Raspberry Pi.

You can install the necessary dependencies on Linux as follows:

$ sudo apt install -y ruby ruby-dev python3 python3-pip make ninja-build

then add these lines to the bottom of your $HOME/.bashrc:

export GEM_HOME="$(ruby -e 'puts Gem.user_dir')"
export PATH="$PATH:$GEM_HOME/bin"

and close and relaunch your Terminal window to have these new variables activated. Finally, run

$ gem install bundler

to install the latest version of the Ruby bundle command.

On macOS

If you don’t already have it, install the Homebrew package manager:

$ /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)"

Next, install Ruby:

$ brew install ruby

And install the Ruby bundler:

$ gem install bundler

If you’re using a system version of Python 3.12, you may also need to run the Python 3.12 certificate-installation script. Find the Python3.12 folder on your machine, and run Install Certificates.command.

Set up Homebrew Version of Ruby

Because macOS provides its own version of Ruby, Homebrew doesn’t automatically set up symlinks to access the version you just installed with the ruby command. But after a successful install, Homebrew outputs the commands you’ll need to run to set up the symlink yourself. If you use the default macOS zsh shell on Apple Silicon, you can set up the symlink with the following command:

$ echo 'export PATH="/opt/homebrew/opt/ruby/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc

If you run macOS on an Intel-based Mac, replace opt/homebrew with usr/local in the above command.

If you run a shell other than the default, check which config file to modify for the command. For instance, bash uses ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile.

Once you’ve made the changes to your shell configuration, open a new terminal instance and run the following command:

$ ruby --version

You should see output similar to the following:

ruby 3.2.2 (2023-03-30 revision e51014f9c0) [arm64-darwin22]

As long as you see a Ruby version greater than or equal to 3.2.2, you’ve succeeded.

Install Homebrew Dependencies

Next, use Homebrew to install the other dependencies.
Start with the latest version of Python:

$ brew install python@3

Then install the Ninja build system:

$ brew install ninja

Then install the Gumbo HTML5 parser:

$ brew install gumbo-parser

And finally, install the YAML module for Python 3:

$ pip3 install pyyaml

Now you’ve installed all of the dependencies you’ll need from Homebrew.

Install Scripting Dependencies

After installing the toolchain, install the required Ruby gems and Python modules. Make sure you’re in the top-level directory of this repository (the one containing Gemfile.lock and requirements.txt), and run the following command to install the Ruby gems (this may take several minutes):

$ bundle install

Then, run the following command to install the remaining required Python modules:

$ pip3 install --user -r requirements.txt

Building the Documentation Site

After you’ve installed both the toolchain and scripting dependencies, you can build the documentation with the following command:

$ make

This automatically uses Ninja build to convert the source files in documentation/asciidoc/ to a suitable intermediate structure in build/jekyll/ and then uses Jekyll AsciiDoc to convert the files in build/jekyll/ to the final output HTML files in documentation/html/.

You can also start a local server to view the built site:

$ make serve_html

As the local server launches, the local URL will be printed in the terminal – open this URL in a browser to see the locally-built site.

You can also use make to delete the build/ and documentation/html/ directories:

$ make clean

Building with Doxygen

If you want to build the Pico C SDK Doxygen documentation alongside the main documentation site you will need to install some additional dependencies:

$ sudo apt install -y cmake gcc-arm-none-eabi doxygen graphviz

and then you can build the documentation with:

$ make build_doxygen_adoc
$ make

You clean up afterwards by using:

$ make clean_everything

which will revert the repository to a pristine state.

Licence

The Raspberry Pi documentation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA). While the toolchain source code — which is everything outside of the top-level documentation/ subdirectory — is Copyright © 2021 Raspberry Pi Ltd and licensed under the BSD 3-Clause licence.