Setup and Installation of GitBook

Getting GitBook installed and ready-to-go should only take a few minutes.

GitBook.com

GitBook.com is an easy to use solution to write, publish and host books. It is the easiest solution for publishing your content and collaborating on it.

It integrates well with the GitBook Editor.

Local Installation

Requirements

Installing GitBook is easy and straightforward. Your system just needs to meet these two requirements:

• NodeJS (v4.0.0 and above is recommended)
• Windows, Linux, Unix, or Mac OS X

Install with NPM

The best way to install GitBook is via NPM. At the terminal prompt, simply run the following command to install GitBook:

$ npm install gitbook-cli -g

gitbook-cli is an utility to install and use multiple versions of GitBook on the same system. It will automatically install the required version of GitBook to build a book.

Create a book

GitBook can setup a boilerplate book:

$ gitbook init

If you wish to create the book into a new directory, you can do so by running gitbook init ./directory

Preview and serve your book using:

$ gitbook serve

Or build the static website using:

$ gitbook build

Install pre-releases

gitbook-cli makes it easy to download and install other versions of GitBook to test with your book:

$ gitbook fetch beta

Use gitbook ls-remote to list remote versions available for install.

Debugging

You can use the options --log=debug and --debug to get better error messages (with stack trace). For example:

$ gitbook build ./ --log=debug --debug