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Building and publishing your book

Once you've added content and configured your book, it's time to build the HTML for each page of your book. We'll use the jupyter-book build command-line tool for this. In the next step, we'll stitch these HTML pages into a book.

Prerequisites

In order to build the HTML for each page, you should have followed the steps in creating your Jupyter Book structure. You should have a Jupyter Book structure in a local folder on your computer, a collection of notebook/markdown files in your content/ folder, a _data/toc.yml file that defines the structure of your book, and any configuration you'd like in the config.yml file.

Build each page's HTML

Now that your book's content is in the content/ folder and you've defined your book's structure in _data/toc.yml, you can build the HTML for each page of your book.

Do so by running the following command:

jupyter-book build mybookname/

This will:

  • Use the links specified in the _data/toc.yml file (pointing to files in /content/) and do the following:
    • Run nbconvert to turn the content files (e.g., .ipynb, .md, etc) files into HTML
    • Replace relative image file paths so that they work on your new built book
    • Place all these generated files in the mybookname/_build/ directory.

After this step is finished, you should have a collection of HTML files in your _build/ folder.

Page HTML caching

By default, Jupyter Book will only build the HTML for pages that have been updated since the last time you built the book. This helps reduce the amount of unnecessary time needed to build your book. If you'd like to force Jupyter Book to re-build a particular page, you can either edit the corresponding file in the content/ folder, or delete that page's HTML in the _build/ folder.

Create an online repository for your book

You've created your book on your own computer, but you haven't yet added it online. This section covers the steps to create your own GitHub repository, and to add your book's content to it. In this case, we'll use GitHub-Pages to build the HTML for your book. However, you can also build the book's HTML manually. Both will be covered in building and publishing your book.

  1. First, log-in to GitHub, then go to the "create a new repository" page:

    https://github.com/new

  2. Next, add a name and description for your book. You can choose whatever initialization you'd like.

  3. Now, clone the empty repository to your computer:

    git clone https://github.com/<my-org>/<my-book-name>

  4. Copy all of your book files and folders (what was created when you ran jupyter-book create mybook) into the new repository. For example, if you created your book locally with jupyter-book create mylocalbook and your online repository is called myonlinebook, the command would be:

    cp -r mylocalbook/* myonlinebook/

    This will copy over the local book files into the online book folder.

  5. Commit the new files to the repository in myonlinebook/:

    cd myonlinebook
git add ./*
git commit -m "adding my first book!"
git push

That's it!

Next step: build your book

Now that you've created the HTML for each page of your book, it's time to stitch them together into a book. That's covered in the next section.