Helping with documentation#

A great way to contribute to the project is to improvedocumentation.

If you are an Arrow user and you found some docs to beincomplete or inaccurate, share your hard-earned knowledgewith the rest of the community.

If you didn’t come across something to improve in thedocumentation itself, you can search for an issue in GitHub.

Note

When searching for an issue that deals with documentation,navigate toGitHub labelsand selectComponent: Documentation or search forDocumentationin the “Search all labels” window.

SeeExample search.

Documentation improvements are also a great way to gain someexperience with our submission and review process withoutrequiring a lot of local development environment setup.

Note

Many documentation-only changes can be made directly in theGitHub web interface by clicking theEdit this pageon the right top corner of the documentations page. Thiswill handle making a fork and a pull request for you.

click on edit this page

On the right corner of the file in GitHub click on pen icon.#

edit file in GitHub.

Now you can edit the file in GitHub.#

You could also build the entire project, make the change locally onyour branch and make the PR this way. But it is by no means superiorto simply editing via GitHub.

If you wish to build the documentation locally, follow detailed instructionsonBuilding the Documentation.

Where to find the correct file to change?#

Most of the documentation is located in thedocs/source of the Arrowlibrary. Source folder includes:

  • C++ documentation section:docs/source/cpp.

  • Development section:docs/source/developers.

  • Specifications and protocols section:docs/source/format.

  • Language documentation

    C (GLib), Java, JavaScript andPython documentation is locatedin folders named by the language, for example:docs/source/c_glib.

    Reference documentation

    To editAPI reference documentation for Python,you will need to edit the docstrings of the functions and methods located inthepyarrow package itself. For example, to editpyarrow.Arrayyou will need to editdocstrings inarrow/pyarrow/array.pxi.

    It is similar for C++.

  • The documentation for thearrow R package (which is published onthe pkgdown site atarrow.apache.org/docs/r/) is located withinther/ subdirectory.

    See also

    To read more about documentation in R please visit:

Cookbooks have their own repositoryapache/arrow-cookbookand can be separately cloned and built.