mdBook

In the last days my main occupation was writing. Once a bit time was at hand I focused on getting something written, by hand or by the computer. For projects that mainly consist of written text, I needed to have some type bookish-like website with an easy to use interface.

Several years ago I read a CTF Field Guide from Dan Guido. He used GitBook to publish it. It uses markdown to render via some Node.js library to a website and can be used comfortably from the CLI. I used it for some other unrelated projects documentation and it was quite a catch.

And because I’m writing that much currently, I decided to re-use GitBook again. However, I’ve been a bit sadden to read the follow message on the project page on Github:

As the efforts of the GitBook team are focused on the GitBook.com platform, the CLI is no longer under active development. All content supported by the CLI are mostly supported by our GitBook.com / GitHub integration. Content hosted on the legacy.gitbook.com will continue working until further notice. For differences with the new vesion, check out our documentation.

Using a CLI is for me a essential part of the workflow and using it via some website is a no-go. Lucky, there is another project that does provide a similar feature as GitBook. It is called mdBook and was developed for the Rust book: ‘The Rust Programming Language’. As one can imaging, it was written in Rust. A language I prefer over any NodeJS one.

The installation is plain simple, install via cargo mdBook and you’re good go!

so far,
akendo