typesetting/quad/qtest/mds/cmdline.md

Command-Line Tools

Racket provides, as part of its standard distribution, a number of command-line tools that can make racketeering more pleasant.

1. Compilation and Configuration: raco

The raco short for “**Ra**cket **co**mmand” program provides a command-line interface to many additional tools for compiling Racket programs and maintaining a Racket installation.

• raco make compiles Racket source to bytecode.

  For example, if you have a program "take-over-world.rkt" and you’d like to compile it to bytecode, along with all of its dependencies, so that it loads more quickly, then run

    raco make take-over-the-world.rkt

  The bytecode file is written as "take-over-the-world_rkt.zo" in a "compiled" subdirectory; ".zo" is the file suffix for a bytecode file.

• raco setup manages a Racket installation, including manually installed packages.

  For example, if you create your own library collection called "take-over", and you’d like to build all bytecode and documentation for the collection, then run

    raco setup take-over

• raco pkg manages packages that can be installed through the Racket package manager.

  For example, to see the list of installed packages run:

    raco pkg show

  To install a new package named <package-name> run:

    raco pkg install <package-name>

  See [missing] for more details about package management.

For more information on raco, see [missing].

2. Interactive evaluation

The Racket REPL provides everything you expect from a modern interactive environment. For example, it provides an ,enter command to have a REPL that runs in the context of a given module, and an ,edit command to invoke your editor as specified by the `EDITOR` environment variable on the file you entered. A ,drracket command makes it easy to use your favorite editor to write code, and still have DrRacket at hand to try things out.

For more information, see [missing].

3. Shell completion

Shell auto-completion for bash and zsh is available in "share/pkgs/shell-completion/racket-completion.bash" and "share/pkgs/shell-completion/racket-completion.zsh", respectively. To enable it, just run the appropriate file from your .bashrc or your .zshrc.

The "shell-completion" collection is only available in the Racket Full distribution. The completion scripts are also available online.