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)

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

# Single RFC
govctl rfc render 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
govctl render changelog  # → CHANGELOG.md

Render Single Items

Each resource type supports single-item rendering:

govctl rfc render RFC-0010
govctl adr render ADR-0005
govctl work render WI-2026-01-17-001

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.

Keyboard shortcuts

govctl