Getting started with GitBook
Installation
Official guide for setting up and installing GitBook. The best way to install GitBook is via npm:
which npm
/usr/local/bin/npm
sudo npm install gitbook-cli -g
Password:
/usr/local/bin/gitbook -> /usr/local/lib/node_modules/gitbook-cli/bin/gitbook.js
gitbook-cli@2.3.0 /usr/local/lib/node_modules/gitbook-cli
├── bash-color@0.0.4
├── q@1.4.1
├── semver@5.1.0
├── user-home@2.0.0 (os-homedir@1.0.2)
├── commander@2.9.0 (graceful-readlink@1.0.1)
├── tmp@0.0.28 (os-tmpdir@1.0.2)
├── optimist@0.6.1 (wordwrap@0.0.3, minimist@0.0.10)
├── lodash@4.5.1
├── fs-extra@0.26.5 (path-is-absolute@1.0.1, klaw@1.3.1, jsonfile@2.4.0, graceful-fs@4.1.11, rimraf@2.5.4)
├── npm@3.7.5
└── npmi@1.0.1 (semver@4.3.6, npm@2.15.11)
Getting started
GitBook can setup a boilerplate book.
mkdir book_test
gitbook init book_test/
ls -1
README.md
SUMMARY.md
Previewing
Preview and serve your book using:
gitbook serve
View site at http://localhost:4000. If you make changes while serving the page, they will automatically incorporated.
Directory Structure
A basic GitBook usually looks something like this:
.
├── book.json
├── README.md
├── SUMMARY.md
├── chapter-1/
| ├── README.md
| └── something.md
└── chapter-2/
├── README.md
└── something.md
GitBook uses a SUMMARY.md file to define the structure of chapters and sub-chapters of the book. The SUMMARY.md file is used to generate the book’s table of contents. The format of SUMMARY.md is just a list of links. The link’s title is used as the chapter’s title, and the link’s target is a path to that chapter’s file.
Generate a PDF
ebook-convert is required to generate ebooks (epub, mobi, pdf). Install the Calibre application first.
gitbook pdf . blah.pdf
GitBook with R Markdown
library(devtools)
install_github("jbryer/Rgitbook")
library(Rgitbook)
Download and install Node.js. Despite installing Node.js, I’m still getting the error:
newGitbook("testbook")
Error in checkForGitbook(quiet = TRUE) :
Cannot find node.js. You can install it from http://nodejs.org/download/