A Simple Gitbook Summary Generator

README.md

A Simple Gitbook Summary Generator

Let's say you use a local editor like Obsidian or Typora to take notes on a daily basis and save them all on your local file system. One day, you want to build a blog to share these notes, but too lazy to generate an outline for them. Well, this script is for you.

Suppose your notes are organized like this:

notes
├── 2021
│   ├── document_1.md
│   └── document_2.md
├── 2020
│   ├── document_0.md
│   └── cats.md
├── README.md // the homepage content

Just run gitbook_summary_generator.py <path_to_notes> > SUMMARY.md, and you can easily build a simple static blog with gitbook.

Within each directory, the notes are sorted by last modified date. By default, the script reads the first line of the note as the title of the note. If you don't have any title in a note, it uses the document's filename and replaces '_'s to spaces.

You can freely use and modify this script as you want.

-- cyanide

gitbook_summary_generator.py

#!/usr/bin/env python3

# gitbook_summary_generator.py

import os,sys

def walk(root):
    dirs_0 = []
    for parent, dirnames, filenames in os.walk(root):
        dirs_0.append([parent, dirnames, filenames])
    dirs = []
    for d in dirs_0:
        if ('.git' in d[0]) or ('_book' in d[0]):
            pass
        else:
            dirs.append(d)
    return dirs

def filter_files(dirs):
    docs = []
    for i in dirs:
        for f in i[2]:
            if (f[-3:] == '.md') or (f[-3:] == '.MD'):
                docs.append(os.path.join(i[0],f))
    return docs

def getmtime(path):
    return os.path.getmtime(path)

def sort(docs,root):
    dirs = []
    dir_content = dict()
    for d in docs:
        dirname = os.path.dirname(d)
        if (dirname not in dirs):
            dirs.append(dirname)
            dir_content[dirname] = []
        dir_content[dirname].append(d)
    for d in dirs:
        dir_content[d].sort(key=getmtime, reverse=True)
    dirs.sort(key=getmtime, reverse = True)
    dirs.remove(root)
    dirs.insert(0,root)
    return dirs, dir_content

def generate_title(path):
    f = open(path)
    first_line = f.readline()
    title = os.path.basename(path)[:-3].replace('_',' ')
    if (first_line[:2] == '# '):
        title = first_line[2:-1]
    elif (first_line[:3] == '## '):
        title = first_line[3:-1]
    return title

def remove_root(path, root):
    new_path = path[len(root)+1:]
    return new_path

def generate(dirs, dir_content, root):
    for d in dirs:
        if (d == root):
            for doc in dir_content[d]:
                if (os.path.basename(doc) != 'SUMMARY.md'):
                    print('* [' + generate_title(doc) + '](' + remove_root(doc, root) + ')')
        else:
            print('- ' + os.path.basename(d))
            for doc in dir_content[d]:
                print('  * [' + generate_title(doc) + '](' + remove_root(doc, root) + ')')


def main(argv):
    dirs = walk(argv)
    docs = filter_files(dirs)
    dirs, dir_content = sort(docs, argv)
    generate(dirs, dir_content, argv)
    
if __name__ == "__main__":
    main(sys.argv[1])