Setup and Installation of GitBook

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

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 @whyun/gitbook -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

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