how to embed a github git README file on a website

Question

I am making a website for someone and they want to be able to have that site fetch the github readme markdown file at a certain URL and display it on the website, so that instead of having to write the readme in two places, it just pulls from github. Is that possible? How do I do it? I saw this:

https://github.com/coreyti/showdown

which turns markdown into html, but I'm still not how I would fetch the readme URL and convert it into an object that showdown could parse.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

GitHub has an option to show file source, Raw button in top right corner. Raw link for your example is: https://raw.github.com/coreyti/showdown/master/README.md

Assuming that README file is formatted in Markdown already, you could just fetch source and format it on your side, libraries most probably already exist for your language.

UPDATE

I wouldn't actually download file from GitHub every time the page on your site is requested. GitHub may be down, connection may be slow -- and this will affect visitors of your site. Instead, you may want to have a cron job running on the server that would download a file from GitHub, say, every five minutes, and cache it locally. Then, every time you need to display the file, you'll read a local copy and don't depend on GitHub server being accessible. As a drawback, you will have a certain synchronization delay (5 minutes in my example).

Answer 2

You can use StackEdit . It allows you to publish your markdown document on Github and on others locations at the same time in Markdown or HTML format. For instance, you could publish the HTML on a public Google Drive or Dropbox location.

NOTE: I'm the developer of StackEdit

Answer 3

Heroku似乎通过复制渲染的html https://elements.heroku.com/buildpacks/stouffi/heroku-i18n-js-buildpack-ruby#buildpack-instructions来做到这一点