moenarchbook

moenarchbook is a utility to create modern online books from Markdown files.

What does it look like?

The [User Guide] for moenarchbook has been written in Markdown and is using moenarchbook 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 moenarchbook.

1. Binaries

   Binaries are available for download [here][releases]. Make sure to put the path to the binary into your PATH.

2. From Crates.io

   This requires at least [Rust] 1.39 and Cargo to be installed. Once you have installed Rust, type the following in the terminal:

   cargo install moenarchbook
   

   This will download and compile moenarchbook for you, the only thing left to do is to add the Cargo bin directory to your PATH.

   Note for automatic deployment

   If 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 moenarchbook when you install it through your script!

   This will constrain the server to install the latest non-breaking version of moenarchbook and will prevent your books from failing to build because we released a new version.

   You can also disable default features to speed up compile time.

   Example:

   cargo install moenarchbook --no-default-features --features output --vers "^0.1.0"
   

3. 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 moenarchbook yourself. Cargo makes this super easy!

   cargo install --git https://github.com/moenarch/moenarchbook.git moenarchbook
   

   Again, make sure to add the Cargo bin directory to your PATH.

Usage

moenarchbook is primarily 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].

• moenarchbook init <directory>

  The init command will create a directory with the minimal boilerplate to start with. If the <directory> parameter is omitted, the current directory will be used.

  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 [CLI docs] for more information and some neat tricks.

• moenarchbook 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.

• moenarchbook watch

  When you run this command, moenarchbook will watch your markdown files to rebuild the book on every change. This avoids having to come back to the terminal to type moenarchbook build over and over again.

• moenarchbook serve

  Does the same thing as moenarchbook watch but additionally serves the book at http://localhost:3000 (port is changeable) and reloads the browser when a change occurs.

• moenarchbook clean

  Delete directory in which generated book is located.

License

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.