In my Githubs repos documentation I want to represent a directory tree structure like this:
Is there a way to do that with Github flavoured markdown, besides just creating it with ascii art?
So basically like this question, but I'm wondering if there is a github specific solution.
Not directly, no. You'd have to hand create it and put it in yourself. Assuming you are using a *nix box locally and are using utf, then tree will generate it nicely (I believe that is what generated the example you used above).
Assuming you mean the readme.md
as the documentation target, then I think the only way you could automate it would be a git pre-commit hook that ran tree
and embedded it into your readme file. You'd want to do a diff to make sure you only updated the readme if the output changed.
Otoh if you are maintaining seperate docs via github pages, then what you could do, is switch to using jekyll (or another generator) locally and pushing the static pages yourself. Then you could potentially implement the changes you want either as a plugin / shell script* / manual changes (if they won't vary much), or use the same method as above.
*If you integrate it into a commit hook, you can avoid adding any extra steps to changing your pages.
I got resolver the problem in this way:
Insert command tree
in bash.
Example
Create a README.md in github repository and copy page of the bash
- Insert markdown code
Example
- See the output and be happy =)
I wrote a small script that does the trick:
#!/bin/bash
#File: tree-md
tree=$(tree -tf --noreport -I '*~' --charset ascii $1 |
sed -e 's/| \+/ /g' -e 's/[|`]-\+/ */g' -e 's:\(* \)\(\(.*/\)\([^/]\+\)\):\1[\4](\2):g')
printf "# Project tree\n\n${tree}"
Example:
Original tree command:
$ tree
.
├── dir1
│ ├── file11.ext
│ └── file12.ext
├── dir2
│ ├── file21.ext
│ ├── file22.ext
│ └── file23.ext
├── dir3
├── file_in_root.ext
└── README.md
3 directories, 7 files
Markdown tree command:
$ ./tree-md .
# Project tree
.
* [tree-md](./tree-md)
* [dir2](./dir2)
* [file21.ext](./dir2/file21.ext)
* [file22.ext](./dir2/file22.ext)
* [file23.ext](./dir2/file23.ext)
* [dir1](./dir1)
* [file11.ext](./dir1/file11.ext)
* [file12.ext](./dir1/file12.ext)
* [file_in_root.ext](./file_in_root.ext)
* [README.md](./README.md)
* [dir3](./dir3)
Rendered result:
(Links are not visible in Stackoverflow...)
Project tree
- tree-md
- dir2
- file21.ext
- file22.ext
- file23.ext
- dir1
- file_in_root.ext
- README.md
- dir3
I made a node module to automate this task: mddir
Usage
node mddir "../relative/path/"
To install: npm install mddir -g
To generate markdown for current directory: mddir
To generate for any absolute path: mddir /absolute/path
To generate for a relative path: mddir ~/Documents/whatever.
The md file gets generated in your working directory.
Currently ignores node_modules, and .git folders.
Troubleshooting
If you receive the error 'node\r: No such file or directory', the issue is that your operating system uses different line endings and mddir can't parse them without you explicitly setting the line ending style to Unix. This usually affects Windows, but also some versions of Linux. Setting line endings to Unix style has to be performed within the mddir npm global bin folder.
Line endings fix
Get npm bin folder path with:
npm config get prefix
Cd into that folder
brew install dos2unix
dos2unix lib/node_modules/mddir/src/mddir.js
This converts line endings to Unix instead of Dos
Then run as normal with: node mddir "../relative/path/".
Example generated markdown file structure 'directoryList.md'
|-- .bowerrc
|-- .jshintrc
|-- .jshintrc2
|-- Gruntfile.js
|-- README.md
|-- bower.json
|-- karma.conf.js
|-- package.json
|-- app
|-- app.js
|-- db.js
|-- directoryList.md
|-- index.html
|-- mddir.js
|-- routing.js
|-- server.js
|-- _api
|-- api.groups.js
|-- api.posts.js
|-- api.users.js
|-- api.widgets.js
|-- _components
|-- directives
|-- directives.module.js
|-- vendor
|-- directive.draganddrop.js
|-- helpers
|-- helpers.module.js
|-- proprietary
|-- factory.actionDispatcher.js
|-- services
|-- services.cardTemplates.js
|-- services.cards.js
|-- services.groups.js
|-- services.posts.js
|-- services.users.js
|-- services.widgets.js
|-- _mocks
|-- mocks.groups.js
|-- mocks.posts.js
|-- mocks.users.js
|-- mocks.widgets.js
The best way to do this is to surround your tree in the triple backticks to denote a code block. For more info, see the markdown docs:
http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#code
You can use <pre> tags as I did in one of my projects.
You can also check this tree-extended package. It can be used as a command line app by using node >= 6.x.
It is very similar to tree
but also has the option of configuring the max deep in the tree, that is one of the awful things of it. Also you can filter by using .gitignore
file.
I just like to generate it with UTF-8 and link it to every file and folder to navigate really easy. Please take a look at the example here.