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:
| File | Description |
|---|---|
book.json |
Stores configuration data (optional) |
README.md |
Preface / Introduction for your book (required) |
SUMMARY.md |
Table of Contents (See Pages) (optional) |
GLOSSARY.md |
Lexicon / List of terms to annotate (See Glossary) (optional) |
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"
}