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ghpreview

When you're writing a README for your project, you want a way to preview the Markdown locally before you push it. ghpreview is a command-line utility that opens your Markdown file in a browser. It uses Github styling and (optionally) automatically refreshes every time you save your source.

While README files are the most common use case, `ghpreview** works with any Markdown file.

Prerequisites

You'll need the icu library:

  • Ubuntu/Debian: sudo apt-get install libicu-dev
  • Mac OS: brew install icu4c

You might also need to install cmake for building native extensions from the dependencies.

Installation

$ gem install ghpreview

Usage

$ ghpreview README.md

This will open your default browser with a preview of README.md exactly as it will appear on Github. For a live-updating preview, use the -w (or --watch) option:

$ ghpreview -w README.md

To use an alternate browser, use the -a (or --application) option:

# On Mac:
$ ghpreview -a Safari.app README.md

# On GNU/Linux:
$ ghpreview -a konqueror README.md

Why is this better than X?

There are several tools available for previewing Markdown files, and many that provide a Github-like style. I've personally used Marked, Mou, and the vim-markdown plugin. All are good tools, but none are able to truly reproduce the custom features added to Github Flavored Markdown. This is especially notable with fenced code blocks and syntax highlighting.

ghpreview is an accurate preview because it uses Github's own HTML processing filters to generate the HTML, and Github's own stylesheets to style it :octocat:

Contributing

  1. Fork it
  2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
  3. Write specs (bundle exec rspec spec)
  4. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
  5. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
  6. Create new Pull Request