Github Flavored Markdown Server (GFMS)

News

You can now use the option -a to tell GFMS to render your documents via the Github Markdown Rendering API. For simplicity, the public access is used, which is limited to 60 requests per hour per an IP address.

If the mode -a is not specified, GFMS will render your doc via Github API only when you manually reload it in the browser (and on the first load). This way you are less likely ot hit the hourly API limit, because you will only use the API to check for correctness occasionally. Use -n to disable this feature.

(based on Node.js, Express.js, Jade, Stylus, ws-rpc and GFM for JavaScript)

I could not find a tool that would allow me to preview Github Flavored Markdown files offline, so I wrote one. (Well it's not completely offline - it loads the Github CSS from Akamai and JQuery from Google's CDN, but you know how to cache them if you need to.)

Basically the only way how to preview GFM somewhat properly, was to commit the file to the Github repo and reload the browser page. However committing just for preview unecessarily pollutes GIT history of the file, and it's a tedious process.

Sure, there are various good Markdown editors for all platforms, but only a few support GFM, and to my knowledge, none properly supports the syntax-colored code blocks denoted by three apostrophes, e.g.

function(arg) {
    // some code here
    for(var i = 0; i < 10; i++)
        console.log('hello ' + i);
}

And none would show the result looking (almost) exactly like at Github.

Limitations

Well, the current implementation of GFMS doesn't color the source code blocks, but it at least renders them correctly. I had to modify the showdown.js from github-flavored-markdown. I made a copy of that file, and fork & pull-request to the original project is on my TODO list. GFMS has github-flavored-markdown as a dependency despite it's not needed, so that the heritage is obvious in NPM.

Another possible shortcoming is that the URLs of the Github CSS files are scraped from www.github.com directly, introducing some fragility inherent to the nature of scraping.

Usage

[sudo] npm install gfms -g
cd your-github-project-dir
gfms -p 1234

(If you don't know how to install NPM, see here: http://npmjs.org/)

Now browse to http://localhost:1234, and select the .md or .markdown file to view.

When you save the source Markdown file in your editor, it will be automatically updated in your browser. So perhaps a good setup is to have both your editor window and your browser window visible at the same time, so that you don't have to switch in between.

License

(The MIT License)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the 'Software'), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.