# Reference

Welcome to the Ivy reference documentation!
If you don't know Ivy at all, take a look at its features, the faq and the tutorials before digging into this reference documentation.

# Reference Overview

This documentation is broken into several parts:

- Introduction

- Terminology
This part gives you the meaning of some words used all over the Ivy documentation, such as organization, module, configurations, settings, ...
- Main Concepts
This part introduces the main concepts used in Ivy: dependency resolvers, variables, patterns, and also a good introduction to a central ivy concept: module configurations.
- How does it work ?
As the title suggests, here you will find an explanation of how Ivy does work internally, which can help to better understand and customize its use.
- Installation
This part describes how to install Ivy.

- Settings Files
This part is dedicated to the specification of the settings file of Ivy (usually called ivysettings.xml). It also gives the list of built-in dependency resolvers available in Ivy.
- Ivy Files
This part is the reference for the module descriptors, the Ivy files in which you describe your dependencies. If you have any questions about what can be done or not in an ivy file, you will find the answer here.
- Ant Tasks
This part describes how to use Ivy from ant. It's in this section that all ant tasks provided by Ivy are specified.
- Using standalone
Even though Ivy is most often used from ant, it can also be used from the command line. This page describes how you can do this.