Directory Structure

GitBook uses a simple directory structure. All Markdown/Asciidoc files listed in the SUMMARY will be transformed as HTML. Multi-Lingual books have a slightly different structure.

A basic GitBook usually looks something like this:

.
├── book.json
├── README.md
├── SUMMARY.md
├── chapter-1/
|   ├── README.md
|   └── something.md
└── chapter-2/
    ├── README.md
    └── something.md

An overview of what each of these does:

Static files and Images

A static file is a file that is not listed in the SUMMARY.md. All static files, unless ignored, are copied to the output.

Ignoring files & folders

GitBook will read the .gitignore, .bookignore and .ignore files to get a list of files and folders to skip. The format inside those files, follows the same convention as .gitignore:

# This is a comment

# Ignore the file test.md
test.md

# Ignore everything in the directory "bin"
bin/*

Project integration with subdirectory

For software projects, you can use a subdirectory (like docs/) to store the book for the project's documentation. You can configure the root option to indicate the folder where GitBook can find the book's files:

.
├── book.json
└── docs/
    ├── README.md
    └── SUMMARY.md

With book.json containing:

{
    "root": "./docs"
}