Simple & quick start with GitBook (and GitHub)

How to start with GitBook for beginners

Simple & quick start with GitBook (and GitHub)

I had a simple mission: write a documentation/information to share with my team. This is technical documentation with code, images, tables, formulas and more. Well, I start to surf on the Internet to search for a different option than Google Docs or Dropbox Page or Microsoft 365 ✍️

Then, I found a list of available options such as ReadTheDocs, Sphinx, MKDocs and a lot more. However, I found Gitbook where the slogan is Document everything! and it caught me. According to the documentation, GitBook is a modern documentation platform where teams can document everything from products to internal knowledge-bases and APIs.

Let's start with GitBook 📝

First, signup at using your Github or Gmail account.

first page on Gitbook
Initial screen on Gitbook

Then, it's done! Then you can start to write! The starting page should look something like this:

starting page in Gitbook
Starting page for a public project in Gitbook

Notice that you can include pages, and to start a page using a template. Moreover, you can integrate it with a Github repository.

Particularly, I created a private repository in Github to link with the Gitbook project. After, I selected the List all repositories options (as the following image) and selected the created repo.

The page where you can link your Github's repository
Link my private GitHub repository

When you selected the repository, you should select the branch(es) to synchronize, by default is the master branch (attention to this: eventually, according to some tech gossips, the master name would be replaced by the main branch...but this is a tech gossip 😬). Then, you could wait a little bit and you got an image like this:

Link success confirmation dialog
Successfully linking process between GitHub and GitBook

Now, of course, you have different options:

  • Writing on the GitBook website, creating pages and content
  • Writing whenever you want, and commit changes
  • Importing content from Confluence, Google Docs, GitHub Wiki, Dropbox Paper, Notion, Quip or from a website
  • Exporting to PDF

Well, I created some text in Markdown format on my machine, add changes, commit a file, and push to the master branch and it almost in real-time, synchronize with the GitBook website! that's incredible 😃

Using the GitBook, you have some templates and options for your writing process:

different options for writing in GitBook
Options for writing using the website

From my perspective, those options are amazing! For instance, the API methods and the Math Equation options look as follow:

You can write your math formula using LaTeX!!! 🤓

In any case, you have several options using GitBook. Add your code selecting the programming language, add tables without using Tables generator and more options. Also, I forgot to mention its integration with Slack, Google Analytics or Intercom (for now, only those).

Then, you can forget about the setup or where to write, just start to write being a developer/coder/programmer or the label that you consider as best to define you in your life.

From a geek to geeks

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