Is there a command line utility for rendering GitHub flavored Markdown?

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 con

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

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 4

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.

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

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