This repo hosts the sources for the Bitcoin developer documentation.

It is an experimental port of the documentation hosted at bitcoin.org (sources), converted from Markdown to reStructuredText (RST) and rendered with Sphinx.

To render the documentation locally you first need to install Sphinx and the required theme modules, e.g. by running

pip install -r requirements.txt

from the root of this repo. Then you can execute Sphinx by calling

make html

This will generate HTML from the RST sources in the directory _build/html. It's all static HTML so you can just open the index.html file in your browser locally to view the rendered documentation.

The RST is generated from the original Markdown sources from bitcoin.org using a helper script, which resides in the helpers directory. Run the script by calling

helpers/import-docs <bitcoin-dot-org/bitcoin.org checkout>

with the path to a local checkout of bitcoin-dot-org/bitcoin.org as argument. This will regenerate the RST files based on the content from the bitcoin.org repository.

This is a temporary mechanism to port the documentation to RST. Once the import is in a good shape and the original information is captured correctly in the converted files, the RST files will become the original source, and the import is not needed anymore. There is a milestone to track the necessary work to be done before detaching from the Markdown sources.

The documentation of the RPC commands is automatically generated from the help of a bitcoin client with another helper tool. This is the content in the reference/rpc directory. Changes in these files need to be done through the helper tool or at least backported to the helper tool after doing them in this repo.

The content of this repo is licensed under the MIT license.