While working on the e-books I published on LeanPub, I have developed a number of useful approaches to get fast(er) feedback on how the book looks. Two earlier blog posts describe some of this:
While this provides a nice feedback cycle, sometimes I like to generate a new preview without pushing to the GitHub repository I am using to share the book content with LeanPub. This happens, when I change settings on the Leanpub site that affect the generation of the book (the title image, font faces and sizes are set via the book’s pages on LeanPub, not a configuration file in the repository).
While I could click thought the UI and navigate to the page where I can generate a new preview, I prefer using a command line tool from my local machine: Rake
The Setup
A warning: The LeanPub API documentation says: “Using the Leanpub API requires a Pro plan.“
To use the LeanPub API, an API key is needed. The link to the API documentation above has information where to get that key. To easily use this API key, I store it in an environment variable LEANPUB_API_KEY.
The Rake Task Definition
In the repository of my book I have a Rakefile containing the task definitions. Here’s the one to trigger the generation of a preview on Leanpub:
require 'rest-client'
namespace :leanpub do
LEANPUB_BASE_URL = "https://leanpub.com/<book_id_on_leanpub>"
namespace :preview do
desc "Generate new Preview on LeanPub"
task :generate do |t|
what_to_generate = t.name.split(':')[1]
url = "#{LEANPUB_BASE_URL}/#{what_to_generate}.json"
begin
RestClient.post url, api_key: ENV['LEANPUB_API_KEY']
rescue RestClient::Exception => e
puts "Got error #{e.message} in", caller.first
exit 1
end
puts "Generation of preview was triggered"
end
end
end
I can now easily generate a preview, without having to leave the IDE I’m using to write the book (or the command line) using this:
$ rake leanpub:preview:generate
Generation of preview was triggered
The Rakefile will likely change, for example to also support publishing a new version of the current ebook, or to make it more flexible in order to handle different ebooks.
Update (8. Jan 2021): It turns out that this is really useful: LeanPub provides a web hook to generate a _sub set_ of the book that also generates the PDF (but not the ebook and mobi file). This saves some time from pushing to GitHub to being able to review the generated file. I now use this web hook most of the time.
I now only generate for full book in all formats when I want to check that the book looks good enough to be published. Since this happens less regularly than pushing to the repository, I use the Rake task.
