Is there a command line utility for rendering GitH

Question

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.

Answer 1

GitHub has a Markdown API you can use.

Answer 2

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>

Answer 3

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 $@

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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:

sudo apt-get install pandoc lynx

Answer 6

Also see https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/128721/24257.

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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