Process AsciiDoc Using the CLI

To confirm that the CLI is available, execute the following command in your terminal application:

If this command completes successfully, information about Asciidoctor and the runtime environment will be printed to the standard output of your terminal:

The runtime environment information varies based on the version of Ruby you’re using and the encoding settings of your operating system.

To invoke Asciidoctor from the CLI and convert an .adoc file, execute:

This will use the built-in defaults for options and create a new file in the same directory as the input file, with the same base name, but with the .html extension.

CLI Options describes the available options and parameters for the Asciidoctor CLI.

The --help option provides self-describing documentation for the asciidoctor command, grouped by topic. If you don’t specify a topic, the --help option prints the usage statement for the asciidoctor command:

You can generate the full documentation (i.e., man page) for the asciidoctor command by passing the manpage topic to the --help option. You can pipe that output to the man pager to view it:

You can also find the man page for the asciidoctor command rendered as HTML in this documentation, which you can view in a browser instead. See asciidoctor(1).

You can print an AsciiDoc syntax crib sheet by passing the syntax topic to the --help option.

The crib sheet itself is composed in AsciiDoc. You can convert it to HTML by piping the output back into the asciidoctor command.

Navigate to the syntax.html file in your browser to see what the examples in the crib sheet look like when converted to HTML.