I'm wondering if there is a command line utility for taking a GitHub flavored Markdown file and rendering it to HTML.
I'm using a GitHub wiki to create website content. I've cloned the repository on my server and would then like to process it into regular HTML. It's important to me that what appears on GitHub is exactly how it should look for my website. I'd also really like to use the fenced blocks with ~~~
, so I'd rather not use standard Markdown syntax only.
I've looked a bit into the JavaScript live preview thinking I could hook it into Node.js, but they say it is deprecated. I've looked at the redcarpet repository, but it doesn't look like it has a command line interface.
I rolled my own solution, however, since no solution here is clearly better than the others, I'll leave the question without a selected answer.
--out
argument to grip to render to an HTML file instead of the browser, would that be acceptable?
--export
option, which renders GFM and its styles to a single file. Does this answer the question?
I wrote a small CLI in Python and added GFM support. It's called Grip (Github Readme Instant Preview).
Install it with:
$ pip install grip
And to use it, simply:
$ grip
Then visit localhost:5000
to view the readme.md
file at that location.
You can also specify your own file:
$ grip CHANGES.md
And change port:
$ grip 8080
And of course, specifically render GitHub-Flavored Markdown, optionally with repository context:
$ grip --gfm --context=username/repo issue.md
Notable features:
Renders pages to appear exactly like on GitHub
Fenced blocks
Python API
Navigate between linked files (thanks, vladwing!) added in 2.0
Export to a single file (thanks, iliggio!) added in 2.0
New: Read from stdin and export to stdout added in 3.0
Hope this helps someone here. Check it out.
I've not found a quick and easy method for GitHub-flavoured Markdown, but I have found a slightly more generic version - Pandoc. It converts from/to a number of formats, including Markdown, Rest, HTML and others.
I've also developed a Makefile
to convert all .md files to .html (in large part to the example at Writing, Markdown and Pandoc):
# 'Makefile'
MARKDOWN = pandoc --from gfm --to html --standalone
all: $(patsubst %.md,%.html,$(wildcard *.md)) Makefile
clean:
rm -f $(patsubst %.md,%.html,$(wildcard *.md))
rm -f *.bak *~
%.html: %.md
$(MARKDOWN) $< --output $@
<pre/>
tag in your GFM source, Pandoc will put <br/>
tags in for the line breaks in it, while GitHub's renderer, though it strips leading whitespace, seems to otherwise leave the content alone.
brew install pandoc
gfm
nor the markdown_github
input formats correctly render things like code blocks.
pip3 install --user markdown
python3 -m markdown readme.md > readme.html
It doesn't handle GitHub extensions, but it is better than nothing. I believe you can extend the module to handle the GitHub additions.
Maybe this might help:
gem install github-markdown
No documentation exists, but I got it from the gollum documentation. Looking at rubydoc.info, it looks like you can use:
require 'github/markdown'
puts GitHub::Markdown.render_gfm('your markdown string')
in your Ruby code. You can wrap that easily in a script to turn it into a command line utility:
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# render.rb
require 'github/markdown'
puts GitHub::Markdown.render_gfm File.read(ARGV[0])
Execute it with ./render.rb path/to/my/markdown/file.md
. Note that this is not safe for use in production without sanitization.
To read a README.md file in the terminal I use:
pandoc README.md | lynx -stdin
Pandoc outputs it in HTML format, which Lynx renders in your terminal.
It works great: It fills my terminal, shortcuts are shown below, I can scroll through, and the links work! There is only one font size though, but the colors + indentation + alignment make up for that.
Installation:
apt: sudo apt-get install pandoc lynx
nix: nix-shell -p pandoc lynx
pandoc readme.md -o readme.md.html
and open the resulting file.
function md { pandoc $@ | lynx -stdin }
Probably not what you want, but since you mentioned Node.js: I could not find a good tool to preview GitHub Flavored Markdown documentation on my local drive before committing them to GitHub, so today I created one, based on Node.js: https://github.com/ypocat/gfms
So perhaps you can reuse the showdown.js from it for your Wiki, if your question is still actual. If not, maybe other people facing the same problem as I did will find (just as I did) this question and this answer to it.
GitHub has a Markdown API you can use.
jq --slurp --raw-input '{"text": "\(.)", "mode": "markdown"}' < README.md | curl --data @- https://api.github.com/markdown > README.html
grip
... You chose. :P
grip
is amazing. But, unfortunately, due to its name it is not possible to find it easily if you forget how it is named. (not available via MacPorts either).
Use marked. It supports GitHub Flavored Markdown, can be used as a Node.js module and from the command line.
An example would be:
$ marked -o hello.html
hello world
^D
$ cat hello.html
<p>hello world</p>
^D
?
I created a tool similar to Atom's Preview functionality, but as a standalone application. Not sure if this is what you're looking for, but it might be helpful. -- https://github.com/yoshuawuyts/vmd
https://i.stack.imgur.com/eciJE.png
This is mostly a follow-on to @barry-staes's answer for using Pandoc. Homebrew has it as well, if you're on a Mac:
brew install pandoc
Pandoc supports GFM as an input format via the markdown_github
name.
Output to file
cat foo.md | pandoc -f markdown_github > foo.html
Open in Lynx
cat foo.md | pandoc -f markdown_github | lynx -stdin # To open in Lynx
Open in the default browser on OS X
cat foo.md | pandoc -f markdown_github > foo.html && open foo.html # To open in the default browser on OS X`
TextMate Integration
You can always pipe the current selection or current document to one of the above, as most editors allow you to do. You can also easily configure the environment so that pandoc
replaces the default Markdown processor used by the Markdown bundle.
First, create a shell script with the following contents (I'll call it ghmarkdown
):
#!/bin/bash
# Note included, optional --email-obfuscation arg
pandoc -f markdown_github --email-obfuscation=references
You can then set the TM_MARKDOWN
variable (in Preferences→Variables) to /path/to/ghmarkdown
, and it will replace the default Markdown processor.
pandoc
with browser
works well for me.
Usage: cat README.md | pandoc -f markdown_github | browser
Installation (Assuming you are using Mac OSX):
$ brew install pandoc
$ brew install browser
Or on Debian/Ubuntu: apt-get install pandoc browser
apt-get isntall pandoc
will do, no need to use insecure, local stuff like brew.
Building on this comment I wrote a one-liner to hit the Github Markdown API using curl
and jq
.
Paste this bash function onto the command line or into your ~/.bash_profile
:
mdsee(){
HTMLFILE="$(mktemp -u).html"
cat "$1" | \
jq --slurp --raw-input '{"text": "\(.)", "mode": "markdown"}' | \
curl -s --data @- https://api.github.com/markdown > "$HTMLFILE"
echo $HTMLFILE
open "$HTMLFILE"
}
And then to see the rendered HTML in-browser run:
mdsee readme.md
Replace open "$HTMLFILE"
with lynx "$HTMLFILE"
if you need a pure terminal solution.
I use Pandoc with the option --from=gfm
for GitHub Flavored Markdown like this:
$ pandoc my_file.md --from=gfm -t html -o my_file.html
pandoc: Unknown reader: gfm
. Going to 2.2.1 fixes this.
sudo apt install pandoc
?
Also see https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/128721/24257.
If you're interested in how we [Github] render Markdown files, you might want to check out Redcarpet, our Ruby interface to the Sundown library.
Ruby-script, which use Redcarpet, will be "command line utility", if you'll have local Ruby
gem install redcarpet
, suppose we're in a directory containing README.md
what next?
My final solution was to use Python Markdown. I rolled my own extension that fixed the fence blocks.
There is a really nice and simple tool for browsing GFM Markdown documents:
GFMS - Github Flavored Markdown Server
It's simple and lightweight (no configuration needed) HTTP server you can start in any directory containing markdown files to browse them.
Features:
Full GFM Markdown support
Source code syntax highlighting
Browsing files and directories
Nice looking output (and configurable CSS stylesheets)
Export to PDF
GitHub has (since) developed a nice modular text editor called Atom (based on Chromium and uses Node.js modules for packages).
A default preinstalled package Markdown Preview lets you display your preview in a separate tab using Ctrl + Shift + M.
I haven't tested its full syntax, but since it's coming from GitHub, I'd be highly surprised if the preview's syntax was different from theirs (fenced blocks using ~~~
work).
Now, while it's not technically command-line based, it uses Node.js and outputs to a DOM-based renderer, which might help anyone trying to render GitHub syntax-based HTML on a Node.js-based webserver, or just edit her/his README.md offline.
I managed to use a one-line Ruby script for that purpose (although it had to go in a separate file). First, run these commands once on each client machine you'll be pushing docs from:
gem install github-markup
gem install commonmarker
Next, install this script in your client image, and call it render-readme-for-javadoc.rb
:
require 'github/markup'
puts GitHub::Markup.render_s(GitHub::Markups::MARKUP_MARKDOWN, File.read('README.md'))
Finally, invoke it like this:
ruby ./render-readme-for-javadoc.rb >> project/src/main/javadoc/overview.html
ETA: This won't help you with StackOverflow-flavor Markdown, which seems to be failing on this answer.
Improving upon @barry-stae's solution. Stick this snippet in ~/.bashrc
function mdviewer(){
pandoc $* | lynx -stdin
}
Then we can quickly view the file from the command-line. Also works nicely over SSH/Telnet sessions.
mdviewer README.md
I found a website that will do this for you: http://tmpvar.com/markdown.html. Paste in your Markdown, and it'll display it for you. It seems to work just fine!
However, it doesn't seem to handle the syntax highlighting option for code; that is, the ~~~ruby
feature doesn't work. It just prints 'ruby'.
A 'quick-and-dirty' approach is to download the wiki HTML pages using the wget
utility, instead of cloning it. For example, this is how I downloaded the Hystrix wiki from GitHub (I'm using Ubuntu Linux):
$ wget -e robots=off -nH -E -H -k -K -p https://github.com/Netflix/Hystrix/wiki
$ wget -e robots=off -nH -E -H -k -K -I "Netflix/Hystrix/wiki" -r -l 1 https://github.com/Netflix/Hystrix/wiki
The first call will download the wiki entry page and all its dependencies. The second one will call all sub-pages on it. You can browse now the wiki by opening Netflix/Hystrix/wiki.1.html
.
Note that both calls to wget
are necessary. If you just run the second one then you will miss some dependencies required to show the pages properly.
Improving upon @barry-stae and @Sandeep answers for regular users of elinks you would add the following to .bashrc:
function mdviewer() {
pandoc $* | elinks --force-html
}
Don't forget to install pandoc (and elinks).
Based on Jim Lim's answer, I installed the GitHub Markdown gem. That included a script called gfm that takes a filename on the command line and writes the equivalent HTML to standard output. I modified that slightly to save the file to disk and then to open the standard browser with launchy:
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
HELP = <<-help
Usage: gfm [--readme | --plaintext] [<file>]
Convert a GitHub-Flavored Markdown file to HTML and write to standard output.
With no <file> or when <file> is '-', read Markdown source text from standard input.
With `--readme`, the files are parsed like README.md files in GitHub.com. By default,
the files are parsed with all the GFM extensions.
help
if ARGV.include?('--help')
puts HELP
exit 0
end
root = File.expand_path('../../', __FILE__)
$:.unshift File.expand_path('lib', root)
require 'github/markdown'
require 'tempfile'
require 'launchy'
mode = :gfm
mode = :markdown if ARGV.delete('--readme')
mode = :plaintext if ARGV.delete('--plaintext')
outputFilePath = File.join(Dir.tmpdir, File.basename(ARGF.path)) + ".html"
File.open(outputFilePath, "w") do |outputFile |
outputFile.write(GitHub::Markdown.to_html(ARGF.read, mode))
end
outputFileUri = 'file:///' + outputFilePath
Launchy.open(outputFileUri)
ruby,
cucumber, etc.) appear to be recognized as fences (because they're rendered in fixed width text), there is no syntax highlighting. Any idea why?
Another option is AllMark - the markdown server.
Docker images available for ready-to-go setup.
$ allmark serve .
Note: It recursively scans directories to serve website from markdown files. So for faster processing of single file, move it to a separate directory.
I recently made what you want, because I was in need to generate documentation from Markdown files and the GitHub style is pretty nice. Try it. It is written in Node.js.
Success story sharing
grip
works right out of the box.