Writebook

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

This is a fork of basecamp/writebook that adds a static site generator: export the public library to a self-contained static HTML site you can host anywhere — no Rails process, login, or editing machinery. See STATIC_SITE_GENERATOR.md for the full guide, or the quick summary below.

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

Static site generator (this fork)

Render the published library to a static HTML directory you can host anywhere — all books, every page, all CSS/JS and image files copied in, no login or editing machinery.

From the admin UI: an admin-only Export to static site button in the library header opens a landing page where you pick a scope — all published books (optionally including unpublished drafts) or a single book to export by itself. It runs the export and shows a result page with the file counts and what to do next (where the files are, how to preview locally, how to deploy), plus a Download .zip button (writebook-static-site.zip, or writebook-<slug>.zip for a single book) and a Preview site button. The live database is never touched — the export runs inside a rolled-back transaction.

From the command line:

bin/rails static:generate                                  # → tmp/static-site
STATIC_HOST=books.example.com bin/rails static:generate    # absolute URLs → this host
STATIC_ALL=1 bin/rails static:generate                      # include unpublished books (DB untouched)

See STATIC_SITE_GENERATOR.md for what's included, the design principles, and the file map.