Have you ever wanted to convert a Github wiki to a set of HTML pages? This can be an easy way to generate new gh-pages (github web pages) based on the projects Wiki.

As of August 2010, you can actually clone a repositories wiki to your local machine just by adding .wiki at the end.

This pulls down all the wiki pages in their current format, by default this is .md files.

Now what can you do with these files? Well how about converting them to HTML so that you can use them in your gh-pages repo?

After cloning the .wiki repo to your local, you can create a script to convert all the files to HTML.

  • first install marked globally via NPM
  • make a directory called html in the root of the repo
  • create a file called convert.sh
  • run chmod +x convert.sh on that file to allow execution
  • paste the following into the file:
#!/bin/bash

# for each md file in the directory
for file in *.md
  do
    # convert each file to html and place it in the html directory
    # --gfm == use github flavoured markdown
    marked -o html/$file.html $file --gfm
done

Now if you look in the html directory, you will see all the markdown files have been converted and are in that folder.

In the next week or so, I will write a new post about how to use this method and the grunt assemble plugin to make simple pages.