Validation & Rendering

govctl provides tools to validate governance artifacts and render them to human-readable formats.

Validation

Check All Artifacts

govctl check

This validates:

• Schema conformance (all required fields present)
• Phase discipline (no invalid state transitions)
• Cross-references (refs point to existing artifacts)
• Clause structure (normative clauses in spec sections)

Check Specific Types

govctl check rfc
govctl check adr
govctl check work

Exit Codes

• 0 — All validations passed
• 1 — Validation errors found

Rendering

Render governance artifacts to markdown for documentation.

Render RFCs

# All RFCs (committed to repo)
govctl render

# Specific RFC
govctl render --rfc-id RFC-0010

Output goes to docs/rfc/RFC-NNNN.md.

Render Other Artifacts

ADRs and work items render to .gitignored local files by default:

govctl render adr      # → docs/adr/
govctl render work     # → docs/work/
govctl render all      # Everything

Hash Signatures

Rendered markdown includes a SHA-256 signature for tampering detection:

<!-- govctl:signature sha256:abc123... -->

If the source changes, the signature won’t match — indicating the rendered doc is stale.

Statistics

Get a summary of your governance state:

govctl stat

Shows:

• RFC counts by status and phase
• ADR counts by status
• Work item counts by status
• Any validation warnings

Building Documentation

For mdbook integration:

./scripts/build-book.sh          # Build static site
./scripts/build-book.sh --serve  # Live preview

This renders all artifacts and generates the book structure.