Create book from markdown files. Like Gitbook but implemented in Rust.
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mdBook is a utility to create modern online books from Markdown files.
What does it look like?
The User Guide for mdBook has been written in Markdown and is using mdBook to generate the online book-like website you can read. The documentation uses the latest version on GitHub and showcases the available features.
Installation
There are multiple ways to install mdBook.
- BinariesBinaries are available for download here. Make sure to put the path to the binary into your
PATH. - From Crates.ioThis requires at least Rust 1.34 and Cargo to be installed. Once you have installed Rust, type the following in the terminal:
cargo install mdbookThis will download and compile mdBook for you, the only thing left to do is to add the Cargo bin directory to yourPATH.Note for automatic deploymentIf you are using a script to do automatic deployments using Travis or another CI server, we recommend that you specify a semver version range for mdBook when you install it through your script!This will constrain the server to install the latest non-breaking version of mdBook and will prevent your books from failing to build because we released a new version. For example:cargo install mdbook --vers "^0.1.0" - From GitThe version published to crates.io will ever so slightly be behind the version hosted here on GitHub. If you need the latest version you can build the git version of mdBook yourself. Cargo makes this super easy!
cargo install --git https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/mdBook.git mdbookAgain, make sure to add the Cargo bin directory to yourPATH. - For ContributionsIf you want to contribute to mdBook you will have to clone the repository on your local machine:
git clone https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/mdBook.gitcdintomdBook/and runcargo buildThe resulting binary can be found inmdBook/target/debug/under the namemdBookormdBook.exe.
Usage
mdBook will primarily be used as a command line tool, even though it exposes all its functionality as a Rust crate for integration in other projects.
Here are the main commands you will want to run. For a more exhaustive explanation, check out the User Guide.
mdbook initThe init command will create a directory with the minimal boilerplate to start with.book-test/ ├── book └── src ├── chapter_1.md └── SUMMARY.mdbookandsrcare both directories.srccontains the markdown files that will be used to render the output to thebookdirectory.Please, take a look at the CLI docs for more information and some neat tricks.mdbook buildThis is the command you will run to render your book, it reads theSUMMARY.mdfile to understand the structure of your book, takes the markdown files in the source directory as input and outputs static html pages that you can upload to a server.mdbook watchWhen you run this command, mdbook will watch your markdown files to rebuild the book on every change. This avoids having to come back to the terminal to typemdbook buildover and over again.mdbook serveDoes the same thing asmdbook watchbut additionally serves the book athttp://localhost:3000(port is changeable) and reloads the browser when a change occurs.mdbook cleanDelete directory in which generated book is located.
3rd Party Plugins
The way a book is loaded and rendered can be configured by the user via third party plugins. These plugins are just programs which will be invoked during the build process and are split into roughly two categories, preprocessors andrenderers.
Preprocessors are used to transform a book before it is sent to a renderer. One example would be to replace all occurrences of
{{#include some_file.ext}} with the contents of that file. Some existing preprocessors are:index- a built-in preprocessor (enabled by default) which will transform allREADME.mdchapters toindex.mdsofoo/README.mdcan be accessed via the urlfoo/when published to a browserlinks- a built-in preprocessor (enabled by default) for expanding the{{# playpen}}and{{# include}}helpers in a chapter.
Renderers are given the final book so they can do something with it. This is typically used for, as the name suggests, rendering the document in a particular format, however there's nothing stopping a renderer from doing static analysis of a book in order to validate links or run tests. Some existing renderers are:
html- the built-in renderer which will generate a HTML version of the booklinkcheck- a backend which will check that all links are validepub- an experimental EPUB generator
Note for Developers: Feel free to send us a PR if you've developed your own plugin and want it mentioned here.
A preprocessor or renderer is enabled by installing the appropriate program and then mentioning it in the book's
book.toml file.$ cargo install mdbook-linkcheck
$ edit book.toml && cat book.toml
[book]
title = "My Awesome Book"
authors = ["Michael-F-Bryan"]
[output.html]
[output.linkcheck] # enable the "mdbook-linkcheck" renderer
$ mdbook build
2018-10-20 13:57:51 [INFO] (mdbook::book): Book building has started
2018-10-20 13:57:51 [INFO] (mdbook::book): Running the html backend
2018-10-20 13:57:53 [INFO] (mdbook::book): Running the linkcheck backend
For more information on the plugin system, consult the User Guide.
As a library
Aside from the command line interface, this crate can also be used as a library. This means that you could integrate it in an existing project, like a web-app for example. Since the command line interface is just a wrapper around the library functionality, when you use this crate as a library you have full access to all the functionality of the command line interface with an easy to use API and more!
See the User Guide and the API docs for more information.
from https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/mdBook
https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook
https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook
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