Markdown guard will watch your markdown documents for changes and convert them to lovely, semantic html. Yay!

You're going to need Guard too.

Install with

$ gem install guard-markdown

Or add it to your Gemfile

gem 'guard-markdown'    

Go see the Guard usage doc for general instructions

The Guardfile is where you define your desired input and output paths. Create it with:

$ guard init markdown

Then tweak the watch statements to your hearts content. It'll look a lot like this:

guard 'markdown', :convert_on_start => true, :dry_run => true do  
	watch (/source_dir\/(.+\/)*(.+\.)(md|markdown)/i) { |m| "source_dir/#{m[1]}#{m[2]}#{m[3]}|output_dir/#{m[1]}#{m[2]}html"}
end

The guard statement defines which guard your configuring and sets any optional parameters.

• :convert_on_start - if true will run all conversions when you start the guard. Defaults to true
• :dry_run - if true won't actually run the conversion process, but it will output the files being watched and the file it would write to. Use it to tweak your watch statements and when you're happy set it to false.

If you want to pass additional options directly to kramdown add them as an additional options hash to kram_ops.

For example to generate a table of contents consisting of headers 2 through 6 first make sure that something like the following is in your markdown source file. This serves as a placeholder which will be replaced with the table of contents. See: Automatic Table of Contents Generation.

* table of contents
{:toc}

Then include the following in the start of your guard markdown block:

:kram_ops_ => { :toc_levels =>  [2, 3, 4, 5, 6]}

The watch statement - ok, it may look a little intimidating. You'll need to know your regular expressions. But this is what it's doing.

watch (/source_dir\/(.+\/)*(.+\.)(md|markdown)/i) { |m| "source_dir/#{m[1]}#{m[2]}#{m[3]}|output_dir/#{m[1]}#{m[2]}html|optional_template.html.erb"}
		 
		^ ------ input file pattern -----------  ^        ^ ---- input file path -------- ^|^ ----- output file path ---^|^ --- template path ---- ^

The "input file pattern" is a regular expression that is used to determine which files are watched by the guard. It'll be applied recursively to all files and folders starting in the current working directory.

Any matches are passed into the block and used to construct the conversion command. The conversion command is a string containing the path to the source file and the desired path to the output file separated by a "|". You can also provide an optional template file. This file, if provided will be used by kramdown to wrap the converted output. The template file is typically an html file, and you define where the converted content will be placed by adding <%= @body %> in the desired location. e.g.

I hope that makes sense :)

Go see the other great guards available

Oh yeah, I'm using Kramdown for the conversion engine. So if you want to know what markdown syntax it supports, go here

• Simplify the required watch statement
  • Seems a little wasteful to have to recreate the input path in the regexp. Must find a way around it.
• Allow the conversion of more doc types using Kramdown