This is the official documentation for the CakePHP project. It is available online at https://book.cakephp.org.

Contributing to the documentation is pretty simple. Please read the documentation on contributing to the documentation over on the cookbook for help. You can read all the documentation within as it is just in plain text files, marked up with Markdown formatting.

Install dependencies, then start the VitePress development server:

npm install
npm run docs:dev

The documentation will be available at http://localhost:5173 with hot-reload enabled.

# Build the static site
npm run docs:build

# Preview the production build locally
npm run docs:preview

• node (version 22 or newer) - JavaScript runtime required by Vite/VitePress
• npm - Package manager (included with most Node.js installations)
• git - Required to install @cakephp/docs-skeleton from GitHub

Docker will let you create a container with all packages needed to build the docs. You need to have docker installed, see the official docs of docker for more information.

Starting in the top-level directory, you can build the provided Dockerfile and tag it with the name cakephp/docs by running:

docker build -f Dockerfile -t cakephp/docs .

This can take a little while, because all packages needs to be downloaded, but you'll only need to do this once.

Now that the image is built, you can run the commands to build the docs:

docker build --progress=plain --no-cache -f Dockerfile -t cake-docs .

docker run -d -p 8080:80 --name cakedocs cake-vitepress

The built documentation will output to the .vitepress/dist directory.

You are welcome to make suggestions for new content as commits in a GitHub fork. Please make any totally new sections in a separate branch. This makes changes far easier to integrate later on.

The documentation is written in Markdown and uses VitePress for static site generation. All documentation files are located in the docs/ directory, organized by version.

The documentation includes built-in search functionality powered by VitePress's local search feature. Search works automatically in both development and production builds without requiring any additional setup.