mdBook

mdBook is a command line tool that turns a folder of Markdown files into a book you can read in a browser. It is written in Rust and is often used for documentation, tutorials and course material.

You organize your chapters in a SUMMARY file, and mdBook builds a navigable site with a table of contents and search. It can watch your files while you write and serve a local preview. Themes and preprocessors let you change the look of the output or add custom syntax to the Markdown.

• Chapters from Markdown with a table of contents
• Built-in search across the whole book
• Syntax highlighting for many languages
• Local preview server that rebuilds on change
• Custom themes and preprocessors

mdBook suits developers, technical writers and open source maintainers who want their docs in plain text under version control. It works well for product manuals, API guides and long-form notes that need a clean, easy to move through layout.

mdBook is free and open source under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. The output is static files, so you host the finished book on any static web host. Setting up a custom theme or a preprocessor usually takes some configuration work, and the project relies on community contributions for fixes and new features.