See the first section of INSTALL. Developers are recommended to use a recent OCaml version, which they can get through opam or Nix, in particular.

We recommend that you use the targets in Makefile.dune. See build-system.dune.md to learn more about them. In the example below, you may omit -f Makefile.dune by setting COQ_USE_DUNE=1.

$ git clone https://github.com/coq/coq.git
$ cd coq
$ make -f Makefile.dune
    # to get an idea of the available targets
$ make -f Makefile.dune check
   # build all OCaml files as fast as possible
$ dune exec -- dev/shim/coqc-prelude test.v
    # update coqc and the prelude and compile file test.v
$ make -f Makefile.dune world
    # build coq and the complete stdlib and setup it for use under _build/install/default
    # In particular, you may run, e.g., coq_makefile from _build/install/default
    # to build some test project

Alternatively, you can use the legacy build system (which is now a hybrid since it relies on Dune for the OCaml parts). If you haven't set COQ_USE_DUNE=1, then you don't need -f Makefile.make.

$ ./configure -profile devel
    # add -warn-error no if you don't want to fail on warnings while building the stlib
$ make -f Makefile.make -j $JOBS
    # Make once for `merlin` (autocompletion tool)

<hack>

$ make -f Makefile.make -j $JOBS states
    # builds just enough to run coqtop
$ bin/coqc <test_file_name.v>
<goto hack until stuff works>

To learn how to run the test suite, you can read test-suite/README.md.

• Coqtop.start: This function is the main entry point of coqtop.
• Coqtop.parse_args : This function is responsible for parsing command-line arguments.
• Coqloop.loop: This function implements the read-eval-print loop.
• Vernacentries.interp: This function is called to execute the Vernacular command user have typed. It dispatches the control to specific functions handling different Vernacular command.
• Vernacentries.vernac_check_may_eval: This function handles the Check ... command.

• Merlin for autocomplete.
• Wiki pages on tooling containing emacs, vim, and git information
• ocamlformat provides support for automatic formatting of OCaml code. To use it please run dune build @fmt, see ocamlformat's documentation for more help.

When using rlwrap coqtop make sure the version of rlwrap is at least 0.42, otherwise you will get

rlwrap: error: Couldn't read completions from /usr/share/rlwrap/completions/coqtop: No such file or directory

If this happens either update or use an alternate readline wrapper like ledit.