GNOME Developer Documentation

Welcome to the GNOME platform! This documentation provides essential information and resources for those developing software with and for the GNOME platform. It is also a portal to other sources of GNOME developer documentation that are available elsewhere.

Content overview

The documentation on this site is organized into three main sections:

• Platform introduction: an introduction to the GNOME platform. This describes the main platform components, development tools and programming languages that can be used.

• Guidelines: detailed development information, including programming and integration guidelines.

• Tooling: useful tools for newcomer and experienced developers

• Tutorials: shorter pages on common topics, with step-by-step instructions.

• Specifications: formal description of formats, IPC interfaces, and other interoperable parts of the GNOME platform

Additional resources

Additional external development resources for the GNOME platform include:

• GNOME Human Interface Guidelines: user experience design guidelines

• GNOME Components: Core and Circle components

• Discussion forums: a great place to ask for help and advice

Platform tools

The following tools are used by the GNOME platform and have their own websites and documentation:

Tool	Role	Documentation
GNOME Builder	GNOME platform IDE	builder.readthedocs.io
Flatpak	App packaging and distribution	docs.flatpak.org
Meson	Build system	mesonbuild.com

Contributing

If you want to contribute to the GNOME developer documentation, you can find it on GitLab.