Writebook

Instantly publish your own books on the web for free, no publisher required.

Writebook is an easy-to-use application for publishing content on the web. Content is authored in Markdown, and books can contain picture pages, chapters, and title pages. Books can be published privately or publicly, and are searchable.

How to get Writebook

Writebook is distributed as a Docker image. The simplest way to install and run it is by using ONCE.

To get started, paste this snippet into a terminal on the machine where you want to install Writebook:

curl https://get.once.com/writebook | sh

Deploying manually with Docker

If you'd rather set the Docker image up yourself, you can use docker run or docker compose to do that. The official image is ghcr.io/basecamp/writebook.

You'll need to route the incoming web traffic to ports 80 and 443 (or just 80 if you run without SSL). To persist the storage of the application, mount a Docker volume to /rails/storage.

You can configure the SSL setting with the following environment variables:

• SSL_DOMAIN - enable automatic SSL via Let's Encrypt for the given domain name
• DISABLE_SSL - alternatively, set DISABLE_SSL to serve over plain HTTP

Running in development

Install dependencies:

bin/setup

Start the development server:

bin/dev