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Developer documentation Students: you probably want the Reference

Developer documentation

This area is for people working on Drafter itself. If you are a student building an app, you want the Reference; if you are an instructor, you want Teach.

Where to go

  • Architecture: the system design in one page: the three run modes, the bridge and client server, and how a click becomes a rendered page. The full, authoritative version lives in ARCHITECTURE.md at the repository root.
  • Full API reference: generated per-module documentation; see below for how it is built.
  • Writing documentation: how to author pages for this site, the front-matter schema, runnable fences, and the CI gates that check them.
  • Template zoo: every design-system element rendered with dummy content, for visual review.

Two more pages are planned but not yet written: a contributing guide (dev setup, test suites, watchers; see the repository README meanwhile) and an internals map.

The API reference

The per-module API pages are generated with mkdocstrings from the source docstrings, and only in full builds:

uv run drafter-docs build --api

renders them under /dev/api/. Regular development builds skip them for speed, which is why the section may be absent from a local preview.

Ground rules worth knowing

  • The student-facing docs never show dicts, comprehensions, lambdas, or exceptions; developer docs have no such limit.
  • docs_legacy/ is mining material from the old site, not part of the build.
  • Skulpt is a legacy engine: its code and its known-failing test suite are outside the validation baseline and should not be modified as a side effect of other work.