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mdBook is a utility to create modern online books from Markdown files.
The Documentation 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.
There are multiple ways to install mdBook.
Binaries
Binaries are available for download here. Make sure to put the path to the binary into your PATH.
From Crates.io
This requires Rust and Cargo to be installed. Once you have installed Rust, type the following in the terminal:
cargo install mdbook
This will download and compile mdBook for you, the only thing left to do is to add the Cargo bin directory to your PATH.
From Git
The 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/azerupi/mdBook.git
Again, make sure to add the Cargo bin directory to your PATH.
For Contributions
If you want to contribute to mdBook you will have to clone the repository on your local machine:
git clone https://github.com/azerupi/mdBook.git
cd into mdBook/ and run
cargo build
The resulting binary can be found in mdBook/target/debug/ under the name mdBook or mdBook.exe.
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 documentation.
mdbook init
The init command will create a directory with the minimal boilerplate to start with.
book-test/
├── book
└── src
├── chapter_1.md
└── SUMMARY.md
book and src are both directories. src contains the markdown files that will be used to render the output to the book directory.
Please, take a look at the Documentation for more information and some neat tricks.
mdbook build
This is the command you will run to render your book, it reads the SUMMARY.md file 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 watch
When 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 type mdbook build over and over again.
mdbook serve
Does the same thing as mdbook watch but additionally serves the book at http://localhost:3000 (port is changeable) and reloads the browser when a change occurs.
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 Documentation and the API docs for more information.
Contributions are highly appreciated and encouraged! Don't hesitate to participate to discussions in the issues, propose new features and ask for help.
If you are just starting out with Rust, there are a series of issus that are tagged E-Easy and we will gladly mentor you so that you can successfully go through the process of fixing a bug or adding a new feature! Let us know if you need any help.
For more info about contributing, check out our contribution guide who helps you go through the build and contribution process!
All the code in this repository is released under the Mozilla Public License v2.0, for more information take a look at the LICENSE file.