Get the arc42 Template

To work with docToolchain, you first need some documents. Let’s fetch the arc42 template for software architecture documentation.

docToolchain comes with a task called downloadTemplate.

./dtcw4 local downloadTemplate
On Windows, use WSL2 — dtcw4 is a Bash script.

The task asks you interactively which language and variant you want. It downloads the template, unpacks it to src/docs/arc42, and adds it to your configuration file.

For CI/CD use, set DTC_HEADLESS=true to use defaults (English, without help).

That’s it — you now have docToolchain with the arc42 template installed. Let’s render it as HTML, PDF, or Microsite in the next steps.