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

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.

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.

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 $@

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.

Maybe this might help:

gem install github-markdown

No documentation exists, but I got it from the gollum documentation. Looking at rubydoc.info, it looks like you can use:

require 'github/markdown'  
puts GitHub::Markdown.render_gfm('your markdown string')

in your Ruby code. You can wrap that easily in a script to turn it into a command line utility:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

# render.rb
require 'github/markdown'

puts GitHub::Markdown.render_gfm File.read(ARGV[0])

Execute it with ./render.rb path/to/my/markdown/file.md. Note that this is not safe for use in production without sanitization.

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:

• apt: sudo apt-get install pandoc lynx
• nix: nix-shell -p pandoc lynx

Probably not what you want, but since you mentioned Node.js: I could not find a good tool to preview GitHub Flavored Markdown documentation on my local drive before committing them to GitHub, so today I created one, based on Node.js: https://github.com/ypocat/gfms

So perhaps you can reuse the showdown.js from it for your Wiki, if your question is still actual. If not, maybe other people facing the same problem as I did will find (just as I did) this question and this answer to it.

GitHub has a Markdown API you can use.

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>

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

This is mostly a follow-on to @barry-staes's answer for using Pandoc. Homebrew has it as well, if you're on a Mac:

brew install pandoc

Pandoc supports GFM as an input format via the markdown_github name.

Output to file

cat foo.md | pandoc -f markdown_github > foo.html

Open in Lynx

cat foo.md | pandoc -f markdown_github | lynx -stdin # To open in Lynx

Open in the default browser on OS X

cat foo.md | pandoc -f markdown_github > foo.html && open foo.html # To open in the default browser on OS X`

TextMate Integration

You can always pipe the current selection or current document to one of the above, as most editors allow you to do. You can also easily configure the environment so that pandoc replaces the default Markdown processor used by the Markdown bundle.

First, create a shell script with the following contents (I'll call it ghmarkdown):

#!/bin/bash
# Note included, optional --email-obfuscation arg
pandoc -f markdown_github --email-obfuscation=references

You can then set the TM_MARKDOWN variable (in Preferences→Variables) to /path/to/ghmarkdown, and it will replace the default Markdown processor.

pandoc with browser works well for me.

Usage: cat README.md | pandoc -f markdown_github | browser

Installation (Assuming you are using Mac OSX):

• $ brew install pandoc

• $ brew install browser

Or on Debian/Ubuntu: apt-get install pandoc browser

I use Pandoc with the option --from=gfm for GitHub Flavored Markdown like this:

$ pandoc my_file.md   --from=gfm -t html -o my_file.html

Building on this comment I wrote a one-liner to hit the Github Markdown API using curl and jq.

Paste this bash function onto the command line or into your ~/.bash_profile:

mdsee(){ 
    HTMLFILE="$(mktemp -u).html"
    cat "$1" | \
      jq --slurp --raw-input '{"text": "\(.)", "mode": "markdown"}' | \
      curl -s --data @- https://api.github.com/markdown > "$HTMLFILE"
    echo $HTMLFILE
    open "$HTMLFILE"
}

And then to see the rendered HTML in-browser run:

mdsee readme.md

Replace open "$HTMLFILE" with lynx "$HTMLFILE" if you need a pure terminal solution.

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

---

> 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

My final solution was to use Python Markdown. I rolled my own extension that fixed the fence blocks.

There is a really nice and simple tool for browsing GFM Markdown documents:

GFMS - Github Flavored Markdown Server

It's simple and lightweight (no configuration needed) HTTP server you can start in any directory containing markdown files to browse them.

Features:

• Full GFM Markdown support
• Source code syntax highlighting
• Browsing files and directories
• Nice looking output (and configurable CSS stylesheets)
• Export to PDF

GitHub has (since) developed a nice modular text editor called Atom (based on Chromium and uses Node.js modules for packages).

A default preinstalled package Markdown Preview lets you display your preview in a separate tab using Ctrl + Shift + M.

I haven't tested its full syntax, but since it's coming from GitHub, I'd be highly surprised if the preview's syntax was different from theirs (fenced blocks using ~~~ work).

Now, while it's not technically command-line based, it uses Node.js and outputs to a DOM-based renderer, which might help anyone trying to render GitHub syntax-based HTML on a Node.js-based webserver, or just edit her/his README.md offline.

Late addition but showdownjs has a CLI tool you can use to parse MD to HTML.

I managed to use a one-line Ruby script for that purpose (although it had to go in a separate file). First, run these commands once on each client machine you'll be pushing docs from:

gem install github-markup
gem install commonmarker

Next, install this script in your client image, and call it render-readme-for-javadoc.rb:

require 'github/markup'

puts GitHub::Markup.render_s(GitHub::Markups::MARKUP_MARKDOWN, File.read('README.md'))

Finally, invoke it like this:

ruby ./render-readme-for-javadoc.rb >> project/src/main/javadoc/overview.html

ETA: This won't help you with StackOverflow-flavor Markdown, which seems to be failing on this answer.

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

I found a website that will do this for you: http://tmpvar.com/markdown.html. Paste in your Markdown, and it'll display it for you. It seems to work just fine!

However, it doesn't seem to handle the syntax highlighting option for code; that is, the ~~~ruby feature doesn't work. It just prints 'ruby'.

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.

Based on Jim Lim's answer, I installed the GitHub Markdown gem. That included a script called gfm that takes a filename on the command line and writes the equivalent HTML to standard output. I modified that slightly to save the file to disk and then to open the standard browser with launchy:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

HELP = <<-help
  Usage: gfm [--readme | --plaintext] [<file>]
  Convert a GitHub-Flavored Markdown file to HTML and write to standard output.
  With no <file> or when <file> is '-', read Markdown source text from standard input.
  With `--readme`, the files are parsed like README.md files in GitHub.com. By default,
  the files are parsed with all the GFM extensions.
help

if ARGV.include?('--help')
  puts HELP
  exit 0
end

root = File.expand_path('../../', __FILE__)
$:.unshift File.expand_path('lib', root)

require 'github/markdown'
require 'tempfile'
require 'launchy'

mode = :gfm
mode = :markdown if ARGV.delete('--readme')
mode = :plaintext if ARGV.delete('--plaintext')

outputFilePath = File.join(Dir.tmpdir, File.basename(ARGF.path))  + ".html"

File.open(outputFilePath, "w") do |outputFile |
    outputFile.write(GitHub::Markdown.to_html(ARGF.read, mode))
end

outputFileUri = 'file:///' + outputFilePath

Launchy.open(outputFileUri)

Improving upon @barry-stae and @Sandeep answers for regular users of elinks you would add the following to .bashrc:

function mdviewer() {
  pandoc $* | elinks --force-html
}

Don't forget to install pandoc (and elinks).

Another option is AllMark - the markdown server.
Docker images available for ready-to-go setup.

$ allmark serve .

Note: It recursively scans directories to serve website from markdown files. So for faster processing of single file, move it to a separate directory.

I recently made what you want, because I was in need to generate documentation from Markdown files and the GitHub style is pretty nice. Try it. It is written in Node.js.

gfm