HonKit

HonKit is building beautiful books using GitHub/Git and Markdown.

Documentation and Demo

HonKit documentation is built by HonKit!

https://honkit.netlify.app/

Quick Start

Installation

Requirement: Node.js LTS version

The best way to install HonKit is via NPM or Yarn.

$ npm init --yes
$ npm install honkit --save-dev

⚠️ Warning:

If you have installed honkit globally, you must install each plugins globally as well
If you have installed honkit locally, you must install each plugins locally as well

We recommend installing honkit locally.

Create a book

HonKit can set up a boilerplate book:

$ npx honkit init

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

Preview and serve your book using:

$ npx honkit serve

Or build the static website using:

$ npx honkit build

You can start to write your book!

For more details, see HonKit's documentation.

Usage examples

HonKit can be used to create a book, public documentation, enterprise manual, thesis, research papers, etc.

You can find a list of real-world examples in the documentation.

Features

Write using Markdown or AsciiDoc
Output as a website or ebook (pdf, epub, mobi)
Multi-Languages
Lexicon / Glossary
Cover
Variables and Templating
Content References
Plugins
Beautiful default theme

Fork of GitBook

HonKit is a fork of GitBook (Legacy). GitBook (Legacy) is deprecated and an inactive project.

HonKit aims to smooth the migration from GitBook (Legacy) to HonKit.

Compatibility with GitBook

Almost all plugins work without changes!
Support gitbook-plugin-* packages
- You should install these plugins via npm or yarn
- npm install gitbook-plugin-<example> --save-dev

Differences with GitBook

Node.js 14+ supports
Improve build/serve performance
- honkit build: use file cache by default
- honkit serve: 28.2s → 0.9s in examples/benchmark
- Also, support --reload flag for force refresh
Improve plugin loading logic
- Reduce cost of finding honkit-plugin-* and gitbook-plugin-*
- Support honkit-plugin-* and @scope/honkit-plugin-* (GitBook does not support a scoped module)
Remove install command
- Instead of it, just use npm install or yarn install
Remove global-npm dependency
- You can use HonKit with another npm package manager like yarn
Update dependencies
- Upgrade to nunjucks@2, highlight.js etc...
- It will reduce bugs
TypeScript
- Rewritten by TypeScript
Monorepo codebase
- Easy to maintain
Docker support

Migration from GitBook

Replace gitbook-cli with honkit.

npm uninstall gitbook-cli
npm install honkit --save-dev

Replace gitbook command with honkit command.

  "scripts": {
-    "build": "gitbook build",
+    "build": "honkit build",
-    "serve": "gitbook serve"
+    "serve": "honkit serve"
  },

After that, HonKit just works!

Examples of migration:

Benchmarks

honkit build benchmark:

https://honkit.github.io/honkit/dev/bench/

Licensing

HonKit is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE for the full license text.

HonKit is a fork of GitBook (Legacy). GitBook is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

Also, HonKit includes bignerdranch/gitbook works.

kekekenta/honkit