24.1 Command-Line Tools

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

24.1.1 Compilation and Configuration: raco

The raco (short for “Racket command”) 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 Package Management in Racket for more details about package management.

For more information on raco, see raco: Racket Command-Line Tools.

24.1.2 Interactive evaluation: XREPL

The Racket distribution includes XREPL (eXtended REPL), which provides everything you expect from a modern interactive environment. For example, XREPL 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 about XREPL, see XREPL: eXtended REPL.

24.1.3 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.