Documentation

Setting up the Environment

The environment should be set up in the usual way for building Erlang/OTP. Set the ERL_TOP environment variable:

cd <your-otp-build-directory>
export ERL_TOP=`pwd`

Also, set a destination path for the documentation:

export TESTROOT=<path>

The repository does not contain a generated configure file. It must be generated as follows

./otp_build autoconf

before configure can be run. When the configure files have been generated, you can build in the usual way as described in the README file. Briefly:

./configure
make

If you are building for release into your own local directory, you’ll need to issue the configure command as follows:

./configure --prefix=<localdir>

Building the documentation

To build the complete documentation for all applications, build it from the top:

make release_docs

If you want to build the documentation only for a specific application, you must build erl_docgen first. Enter the erl_docgen directory and generate the necessary files:

cd $ERL_TOP/lib/erl_docgen
make release_docs

Then enter the directory for the specific application directory, and build its documentation:

cd $ERL_TOP/lib/<application>
make release_docs

This will generate the application’s documentation in three formats: UNIX-style man-page format, HTML, and PDF for the corresponding chapter in the Erlang/OTP Reference manual.

Viewing the documentation (HTML)

The HTML documentation can be viewed by opening index.html in your browser:

cd $ERL_TOP
cd release/`erts/autoconf/config.guess`/doc/