present

present is a tool that lets you interpolate the standard output of arbitrary scripts that get interpreted by the shell into your markdown documents.

Its aim is to provide a nice way to automatically update sections of your markdown documents that might be the standard output of a command, such as command-line utility help outputs or benchmarks.

Demo

Below is a short demo showcasing the main functionality of the program.

CLI

You can install the present command-line utility with the rust package manager cargo:

$ cargo install present

Below is the standard output of present --help, interpolated by the present binary itself!

Interpolate the standard output of arbitrary shell scripts into your markdown files

Usage: present [OPTIONS] [PATH]

Arguments:
  [PATH]  A file or directory path to present.

Options:
      --recursive    Recursively present markdown documents.
      --in-place     Modify documents in place.
      --interactive  Interactively present markdown documents.
      --pretty       Pretty print documents to the terminal.
      --remove       Remove commands within markdown documents.
  -h, --help         Print help
  -V, --version      Print version

Library

present can be used as a library by adding this line to the [dependencies] section in Cargo.toml:

present = "0.2.3"

With present, you can create a File struct by pointing it to a path. This will parse all codeblocks with the present prefix, and add them as commands to the struct. From there, you can present the file by using the File::present function, which will modify the internal content. From there, you can use the File::print or File::save functions to print the presented document to stdout or save it back to the original file.

use std::path::PathBuf;

fn main() {
  let mut file = present::File::new(PathBuf::from("README.md")).unwrap();
  file.present().unwrap();
  file.save();
}

The above snippet is tested with rustdoc. A really cool side effect of this, is that the test loads the README itself, and runs present over it. present is also used throughout the README (to get help-text and version numbers), which means that when running cargo test, the README gets automatically updated.

You can read more about using the library on docs.rs.

Examples

Below are a few examples showcasing what kind of command result interpolations present is currently able to handle.

present foo.md --in-place	foo ```present echo bar ```	foo ```present echo bar bar ```
present foo.md --in-place --remove	foo ```present echo bar ```	foo bar

Prior Art

This project is loosely inspired by Cog, the code generation tool. However, as mentioned above, this project's main target is markdown documents that may benefit to have certain sections automatically updated, due to being the result of a command invocation.