Is there really no manual for Bitcoin Core?

Question

This is not the first time I'm desperately searching for Bitcoin Core help and finding none, but look at this: https://bitcoincore.org/en/doc/0.20.0/

That's the closest thing to a "manual" I can find. But it's about RPC commands. I've gone through their entire damn website (both ones, in fact) and made numerous web searches but find nothing resembling a manual. Where is the manual? Is there a manual?

Right now, I'm trying to get official descriptions of these two configuration options:

1. blocknotify
2. walletnotify

They are not mention anywhere on that page, and seemingly nowhere else officially. Am I supposed to guess what they mean and try to piece together information from ancient questions asked by random people online? How is anyone supposed to get a Bitcoin payment system running and actually use Bitcoin when there is no manual and a hundred BIPs are released per week?

The lack of information has caused countless of my projects to never get off the ground. I don't understand the mentality that a lot of people have that things are somehow "obvious" or "don't need a manual". Especially not when it's for a crucial piece of software which we're supposed to use to revolutionize the world.

Answer 1

There is a manual documenting both examples. The man page for bitcoind.

man bitcoind shows me:

       -blocknotify=<cmd>

              Execute command when the best block changes (%s in cmd is replaced by block hash)
        ....
       -walletnotify=<cmd>

              Execute command when a wallet transaction changes (%s in cmd is replaced by TxID)

They're really not that hard to use.

Note that this machine runs a slightly older version of bitcoind. Newer versions support %w for the name of the wallet, as bitcoind now supports multiple wallets, in addition to %s for the transaction ID.

Answer 2

Most of the documentation about configuration options and RPCs can be found within the software itself.

Both bitcoind and bitcoin-qt have -help and -help-debug startup options. These will print out all of the configuration options and their descriptions.

bitcoin-qt additionally displays this information in Help > Command line options

For RPCs, you can use the help RPC to list all available RPCs. Doing help <command> will show the help text for that particular command. This help text will include a description of what the RPC does, the options, and what to expect in the result.

Answer 3

There is man bitcoind but there is also bitcoin-cli help or bitcoin-cli help <command> which can give you more detail. Bitcoincore.org also has explanations of all RPC calls: https://bitcoincore.org/en/doc/0.19.0/rpc/blockchain/getblockfilter/ and more info.