Madness - Instant Markdown Server

Madness is a command line server for rendering markdown documents in your browser. It is designed to facilitate easy development of internal markdown-based documentation site.

Screenshots

Install

Using Ruby:

$ gem install madness

Using Homebrew:

$ brew install brew-gem
$ brew gem install madness

Using Docker:

$ alias madness='docker run --rm -it -v $PWD:/docs -p 3000:3000 dannyben/madness'

Feature Highlights

Easy to use.
Built-in full text search.
Compatible with how markdown files are displayed on GitHub and GitHub pages.
Configure with a configuration file or command arguments.
Fully customizable theme.
Automatic generation of navigation sidebar.
Automatic generation of Table of Contents (site-wide and per page).
Can optionally show additional file types in the navigation menu (e.g. PDF files).
Optional support for [[Short Link]] syntax.
Optional basic authentication.
Support for extended markdown syntax, such as footnotes and syntax highlighting.

Usage

Go to any directory that contains markdown files and run:

$ madness

And open http://localhost:3000 in your browser.

For more options, run:

$ madness --help

Directory Conventions

Madness expects to be executed in a documentation directory.

A documentation directory contains only markdown files (*.md) and sub directories that contain more markdown files.

The server will consider the file index.md or README.md in any directory as the main file describing this directory, where index.md has priority.

The navigation sidebar will show all the sub directories and files in the same directory as the viewed file.

Example structure:

./
├── README.md
├── File.md
├── Another File.md
├── Folder
│   ├── File.md
│   └── image.png
└── Another Folder
    ├── README.md
    └── File.md

Configuration File

Madness uses sensible defaults, so therefore can be executed without configuring anything. Configuration is mostly done by having a file named .madness.yml in your documentation directory.

For convenience, you can generate a template config file by running:

$ madness create config

which will generate this file, with all the default options:

# .madness.yml

# path to the documentation root
path: .

# server port
port: 3000

# server listen address
bind: 0.0.0.0

# enable sidebar
sidebar: true

# add H1 title to files that do not have one
auto_h1: true

# append navigation to directory READMEs
auto_nav: true

# replace <!-- TOC --> in any file with its internal table of contents
# set to true to enable it with the default '## Table of Contents' caption,
# or set to any string that will be inserted before it as a caption.
auto_toc: true

# enable syntax highlighter for code snippets
highlighter: true

# enable the copy to clipboard icon for code snippets
copy_code: true

# convert [[Links]] to [Links](Links)
shortlinks: false

# generate a table of contents file with this name, for example:
# toc: Table of Contents
toc: ~

# path to theme folder, for example:
# theme: _theme
theme: ~

# open the server URL in the browser
open: false

# provide user:password for basic authentication, for example:
# auth: admin:s3cr3t
auth: false

# if auth is enabled, specify auth realm name
auth_zone: Madness

# show files with these extensions in the navigation and search, for example:
# expose_extensions: pdf,docx,xlsx,txt
expose_extensions: ~

# exclude directories that match these regular expressions
# note that this is an array
exclude: ['^[a-z_\-0-9]+$']

Features

Search

Madness comes with a full text search page.

Images and Static Files

You can put images and other asset files anywhere in your documentation folder.

When linking to other pages or images in your documentation folder, simply use the URL relative to the markdown file.

For example, if you have a folder named subfolder that contains a README.md and a nice-picture.png, showing it in your README is done by this markdown:

![alt text](nice-picture.png)

If you wish to link to images or pages in a different folder, simply specify the path relative to the homepage:

![alt text](/images/nice-picture.png)

Automatic H1

If your markdown document does not start with a level 1 heading, it will be automatically added based on the file name.

Shortlinks

When the shortlinks option is enabled, you may use a shorthand syntax for specifying internal links, where [[Anything]] will be converted to [Anything](Anything), which will then be rendered as an internal link to a file or a directory in the same directory as the file itself.

Table of Contents Generation

Site-wide

To generate a Table of Contents file for the entire site (for the directories and files), run madness --toc FILENAME

In-page

If you have long markdown documents, and you wish to add an inline Table of Contents for them, simply add an HTML comment  where you want the Table of Contents to be generated. The inserted list will only consider H2 and H3 headings.

Note that for this feature to work, your markdown document must use the #-based heading syntax.

The 'Table of Contents' heading can be customized in the configuration file.

Hidden Directories

Directories that are made only of lowercase letters, underscoes, dash and/or numbers (/^[a-z_\-0-9]+$/) will not be displayed in the navigation. In other words, directories must have at least one uppercase letter or a space to be recognized as a documentation directory.

This can be configured by using the exclude configuration option:

# do not ignore any directory
exclude: ~

# ignore only specific directories
exclude: [assets, public]

# ignore using regular expressions
exclude: ['^public$', 'assets']

Controlling Sort Order

To control the sort order of the automatically generated navigation elements, simply prefix your files and directories with digits followed by a dot and a space, just like you would create an ordered list in Markdown. The numbers will be omitted when they are displayed.

./
├── 1. Some file or folder
└── 2. Another file or folder

Displaying Additional File Types

If you wish the navigation and search features to also show other documents and files (for example, PDF files), you may configure the expose_extensions option in the configuration file to contain a comma delimited list of extensions:

expose_extensions: pdf,docx,xlsx,txt

The default value of this option is null (or ~, which is null in YAML).

Basic Authentication

To add basic authentication, use the --auth user:password command line argument or the equivalent auth configuration option.

If you wish to avoid storing the basic authentication credentials in the configuration file, you may use ERB tags to load the credentials from environment variables:

auth: <%= ENV['BASIC_AUTH'] %>

Customizing Theme

There are two ways to change how Madness looks.

Option 1: Change CSS and HTML (Slim)

In order to have complete control over the CSS and generated HTML, you can override the views and styles. Views are provided as Slim templates, and CSS is provided as SCSS.

Madness comes with a command that copies the default theme to a folder of your choice, where you can customize it to your taste. Run:

$ madness create theme my_theme

Where my_theme is the folder that will be created.

To use the created theme, simply run Madness with the --theme my_theme option.

$ madness --theme my_theme

Note that the generated theme contains the SCSS files in the styles subfolder, and the rendered CSS files in the public/css subfolder.

If you wish to use the SCSS files, you will need to render them yourself to the location of your theme styles (e.g. public/css) - you can use any tool to do so, or if you do not have a preference, use SassTool.

Option 2: Change CSS only

If you are looking to implement a smaller CSS change, follow these steps:

Create a directory named css in your root documentation directory.
Copy the main.css file to it.
Update it as you see fit.

Note that this functionality is not guaranteed to stay as is in future versions of madness.

Docker Image

Madness server is also available as a docker image.

This command will start the server on localhost:3000, with the current directory as the markdown documentation folder

$ docker run --rm -it -v $PWD:/docs -p 3000:3000 dannyben/madness

You may create an alias for convenience:

$ alias madness='docker run --rm -it -v $PWD:/docs -p 3000:3000 dannyben/madness'
$ madness --help

For more information about the docker image, see:

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