Download your Gitbook as a PDF with open-source tools

What is Gitbook?

Gitbook is an excellent opensource platform to generate awesome looking documentation and books from simple markdown files. They also have a paid version with an editor. However, the open source free version can easily be paired with Github and Travis to pretty much provide a nice workflow.

The Requirement

The book in question was hosted on Github as Markdowns organised into folders in the master branch. Travis was then configured to run a command gitpub that automatically generated the Gitbook, cleans it up and commits it to the gh-pages branch, from which the github.io page is served. However, we also needed the master branch to have a directly downloadable PDF version of the latest Gitbook output.

The Problem

Generating a PDF with Gitbook is fairly straightforward using the gitbook pdf <gitbook-folder-location> <pdf-location>.pdf command. However, running this command inside Travis.CI throws the following Runtime Error.

File "/usr/bin/ebook-convert", line 20, in <module>
    sys.exit(main())
...
...
...
RuntimeError: X server required. If you are running on a headless machine, use xvfb

As is obvious from the error, the error comes from the ebook-convert plugin, that is required by Gitbook for the PDF generation. However, the command ebook-convert needs to have prepended with xbvf to run in a headless environment like Travis.

And …

There is no direct way to prepend the ebook-convert because that is getting called by Gitbook internally. Trying to change that, would mean modifying Gitbook for yourself.

The Solution

I found this gold nugget which didn’t work for me but definitely led me to my current solution. The workaround was to ‘wrap’ the ebook-convert command so that when Gitbook calls ebook-convert, it is actually calling the wrapper command, that calls the actual command prepended with xbvf.

Steps:

• Create a wrapper shell script in the repository (script provided below)
• Rename the ebook-covert in your /usr/bin folder to ebook-convert2 (or something else!)
• Move your script to the /usr/bin folder as ebook-convert
• Allow the script to be excutable (the command will exit with an error if you don’t do this)

And that’s it! Enjoy your automatic PDFs

Files

wrapper-script

#!/bin/bash
echo "Run xvfb-run /usr/bin/ebook-convert2 $@"
sudo xvfb-run /usr/bin/ebook-convert2 "$@"

.travis.yml

  language: node_js
  node_js:
    - "6"
  before_install:
    - sudo apt-get install -y calibre
    - sudo apt-get install xvfb
  before_script:
    - npm install gitbook-cli
    - npm install gitbook-publish@latest
    - npm install ebook-convert
    - sudo mv /usr/bin/ebook-convert /usr/bin/ebook-convert2
    - sudo cp ./ebook-wrapper.sh /usr/bin/ebook-convert
    - sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/ebook-convert
  script:
    - git config --global user.email "akshatamohanty@gmail.com"
    - git config --global user.name "Akshata"
    - gitbook pdf ./ ./published/urban-prototyping.pdf
    - git add ./published/urban-prototyping.pdf
    - git status
    - git commit -m"Published PDF"
    - git status
    - git push "https://{USER_NAME}:${GITHUB_TOKEN}@github.com/${GITHUB_REPO}" master
    - gitpub
    - git branch
    - git remote -v
    - git push --force "https://{USER_NAME}:${GITHUB_TOKEN}@github.com/${GITHUB_REPO}" gh-pages