Generate a README for GitHub Repo Quickly
A guide on how to use a tool to generate the Readme file.
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A guide on how to use a tool to generate the Readme file.
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Was this helpful?
Have you ever wished there was someone who would make a pro-style guide for the awesome banger project you’re working on? Someone who would do it without any mean faces or a tool that would do this automatically for you by just putting in the necessary information?
The tool is what I’m talking about. This will make your boring or no-info Readme file into an awesome one and we’re gonna make this Markdown file right now within minutes.
If you’re a regular open-source dev, then you can skip this part and continue. For those who’re new to terms like ‘open-source’, ‘Git/GitHub’, ‘repo’ etc., here’s what a Readme file is:
A is a text file that introduces and explains a project. It contains information that is commonly required to understand what the project is about.
-Source:
So, in other terms, it’s a file written in the (.md) for your open-source project, that contains the overall outline of the project like what the project is, how to get started, how others can contribute to it, and all the necessary information that one should get without peeping on your code.
The next obvious question that comes is, “Why should I make this Markdown file? What’s the need?” The importance of a Readme file lies in its content. If your Readme isn’t good with the content (missing an important detail), then you should rather don’t make it or put it upfront of your repo because its this file only that your audience will see first to get answers to the question(s) they have about the project. They might want to collaborate with that project, so if you forgot to include the Readme file or made a sloppy one, then it’s a straight no-go.
As says (ah, the irony!):
CLI that generates beautiful README.md files.
readme-md-generatorwill suggest you default answers by reading yourpackage.jsonandgitconfiguration.
It’s a CLI tool that promises to generate beautiful Readme files with fewer efforts, thereby making the process much quicker. It will read content from your common project files like package.json, git config, etc. to suggest your default answers during the file creation process.
Basic .
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The package.json file is not a necessity for it to work, you can also manually write the information it asks during the process.
Let’s make a beautiful Readme with just two simple steps.
Next, kick-off the Readme generator with the following command while in your project root:
If you’re lazy here too, then you will need to add the -y flag to accept all the default answers:
Upon finishing resolving its modules, it will start asking you a few questions regarding the project. Here’s a quick GIF of what I answered while making the Readme for the Forkify-JS project:
A quick walkthrough of the process.
As you can see, the first thing it asked here was “Do you want to override existing Readme file?” This is because my project had a Readme.md file generated by this tool previously. So yes, if you want to make some changes or by accident entered something wrong the first time, you can run the command again!
That HTML template styling is optional. By saying “Yes”, it will use both Markdown and HTML code to make this MD file. The next set of questions are all about your project and you. Just fill-up the necessary details, and when it says Readme generated, you’re all done. In just two simple steps, you generated a Readme file for your project. Party parrot yet?
For this article, I’ll be using my repo hosted on GitHub. It’s — a Vanilla JavaScript-based application that gets you recipe results. Just for your information, this project does include the optional package.json file (you’ll see the tool getting data from this file in the GIF below). Again, you can use any project with or without that file.
You will need to open up your Terminal (or equivalent command-line) and navigate to the project folder. When you’re in your folder, you can make sure you’re in the correct one (so that you don’t mess up later) by typing ls or dir to see the folder contents. s a good comparison of different commands to use for both macOS and Windows.
There’s also a bonus option if you want to use your own :
Not yet, we got to see that generated Readme! So, :
I would suggest you contribute to this awesome project. It’s open-sourced, so it has its and sections where you can take a look. Also, if you didn’t like the generated file and want to edit it right on your machine without opening a browser I would suggest two great software/tools for this. The first one is and the second is the VS Code’s Markdown editor .
