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

See also

Older guides and API references that used to be hosted on developer.gnome.org are now archived on a separate website.

Additional resources#

Additional external development resources for the GNOME platform include:

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.