This folder contains documentation for “Elektra – the configuration framework for everyone”. If you do not know what Elektra is, we recommend that you check out our homepage first. This ReadMe deals with the content of the documentation folder and should give you a hint where to look for specific information.

Introductory

Goals: We specify the goals and target audiences for Elektra in this document.
Why: This document describes why you should use Elektra.
Vision: This document describes the vision behind Elektra.
Big Picture: This document provides an birds eye view of Elektra and the key database (KDB).
Security: This guideline shows how Elektra handles security concerns.
Tutorials: The tutorials folder provides various user related tutorials. If you are interested in developer related tutorials instead, then please take a look at the folder dev.
News: The news folder contains release notes and other recent information about Elektra.
Paper: This directory contains a research paper about Elektra, also available in PDF format.

Using Elektra

Installation: These instructions tell you how you can install Elektra in your favorite operating system.
Compile: If you want to compile Elektra from source, please look at this document.
Debugging: If you want to debug Elektra, please look at this document.
Help: This folder contains our man pages in Markdown format. The folder man contains these man pages in roff format, which you can read using the Unix utility man if you already installed Elektra.
Keynames: This document describes how Elektra's keynames work.

API

API: This overview of the application programming interface tells you how you can develop an application that uses Elektra.
Design: This document describes the design of Elektra’s C API.

Advanced Information

Metadata: This document specifies data about the KDB (meta information), like supported data types and configuration options.
Contract: The plugin contract specifies keys and values that an Elektra plugin provides.

Elektra Internals

Copy-on-write: This document gives a technical overview over our copy-on-write implementation for Key and KeySet.

Contributing

Coding: The coding guidelines describe the basic rules you should keep in mind when you want to contribute code to Elektra.
Git: This document describes how we use the version control system Git to develop Elektra.
Ideas: If you want to contribute to Elektra and do not know what, you can either take a look here or at our issue tracker.
ToDo: This folder contains various ToDo items for future releases of Elektra.
Authors: This file lists information about Elektra’s authors.

Other

Images: The images folder contains logos and other promotional material.
Decisions: If you are interested in why Elektra uses a certain technology or strategy, then please check out the documents in this folder.
Markdown Link Converter: This tool converts links in Markdown files to make them usable in our Doxygen documentation.
Usecases: This folder contains use cases for our snippet sharing service and the upcoming web user interface for the KDB.
Glossary: The glossary explains common terminology used in the documentation.