mdBook can be used either as a command line tool or a Rust crate. Let's focus on the command line tool capabilities first.

Precompiled binaries are provided for major platforms on a best-effort basis. Visit the releases page to download the appropriate version for your platform.

mdBook can also be installed from source

mdBook is written in Rust and therefore needs to be compiled with Cargo. If you haven't already installed Rust, please go ahead and install it now.

Installing mdBook is relatively easy if you already have Rust and Cargo installed. You just have to type this snippet in your terminal:

cargo install mdbook

This will fetch the source code for the latest release from Crates.io and compile it. You will have to add Cargo's bin directory to your PATH.

Run mdbook help in your terminal to verify if it works. Congratulations, you have installed mdBook!

The git version contains all the latest bug-fixes and features, that will be released in the next version on Crates.io, if you can't wait until the next release. You can build the git version yourself. Open your terminal and navigate to the directory of you choice. We need to clone the git repository and then build it with Cargo.

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/mdBook.git
cd mdBook
cargo build --release

The executable mdbook will be in the ./target/release folder, this should be added to the path.