Getting and building the Firebird manual module

The manual module is part of the Firebird Project at SourceForge. It is a collective effort, aimed at producing comprehensive and accurate documentation on the Firebird RDBMS (Relational Database Management System).

It is important to understand that the manual module contains the documentation in source form – to be more precise: in Docbook XML format. These sources need to be processed (built) to obtain easily readable docs, which can then be published on the Internet.

Yes! At the time of this writing, most useful Firebird documentation has been produced outside the Firebird manual module. We still have a long way to go before the documentation in the manual module will be anywhere near complete. In fact, one of the reasons this Howto is written is that it can help would-be docwriters to overcome their first hurdles.

If you are looking for ready Firebird documentation and lots of it, your best starting places at this moment are:

Sure there's an easier way. As soon as a piece of documentation reaches a certain level of maturity, as well as after significant updates, it is published – in PDF and HTML – on the Firebird website. You can find all the docs we have published via the HTML and PDF index pages:

Or visit the Documentation Subproject homepage:

You should download the manual module and build the docs yourself if and only if:

If one of the above applies to your situation, this Howto is for you.