Source documentation
The FreeCAD source code is commented to allow automatic HTML documentation generation using Doxygen, a popular source code documentation system. Doxygen can document both the C++ and Python parts of FreeCAD.
The online source documentation is located at the FreeCAD API website. Please note that this documentation is not always kept to date; if you have pressing questions about the code please ask in the developer section of the FreeCAD forum.
Build source 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 code.
sudo apt install doxygen graphviz
Then follow the same steps you would do to compile FreeCAD, as described on the compile on Unix 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$(nproc --ignore=2) DevDoc
As mentioned in compiling (speeding up), the -j
option helps shorten compilation time. The resulting documentation files will appear in the directory
freecad-build/doc/SourceDocu/html/
The point of entrance to the documentation is the index.html
file, which you can open with your web browser:
xdg-open freecad-build/doc/SourceDocu/html/index.html
The DevDoc
target will generate a significant amount of data, around 2 GB of new files, particularly due to the diagrams created by Graphviz.
An alternative, smaller version of the documentation which takes only around 500 MB can be generated with a different target. This is the version displayed on the FreeCAD API website.
make -j$(nproc --ignore=2) WebDoc
Old FreeCAD 0.12 API documentation is here.
Here is another FreeCAD 0.19dev Doxygen documentation as well as a previous version 0.16dev_documentation, generate by qingfeng.xia.
Integrate Coin3D documentation
On unix systems, it is possible to link Coin3D source documentation with FreeCAD's. It allows easier navigation and complete inheritance diagrams for Coin derived classes.
- On Debian and derived systems:
- - Install the package libcoin60-doc
- - Uncompress the file /usr/share/doc/libcoin60-doc/html/coin.tag.gz
- - Regenerate source documentation
- You are up for offline browsing.
- If you don't want to or can't install Coin doc package, the links will be generated to access coin doc online at doc.coin3D.org, if doxygen tag file can be downloaded at configure time (wget).
How to integrate doxygen in to the FreeCAD source code
Example of a complete doxygen page: (from another project)
doxygen: http://www.vtk.org/doc/nightly/html/classvtkArrayCoordinates.html
source: https://github.com/Kitware/VTK/blob/master/Common/Core/vtkArrayCoordinates.h
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