Improve build and build instructions

[torkleyy]

If you build in the crate root, horrible things happen (I don't know exactly, but book/src disappeared and my source files were inside book then).

Please add something to the readme, so that the user knows where to execute the command. Alternatively, detect if rustook is executed in the book directory and search for one if not.

[azerupi]

I am not exactly sure I understand what happened, could you give more information about the problem you ran into?

[torkleyy]

I created a cargo project using

cargo new hello

and a folder book inside it:

hello/
├── book
├── Cargo.toml
└── src
    └── lib.rs

Now, I cd into hello/book and execute

mdbook init --theme

which gives me

hello/
├── book
│   ├── book
│   └── src
│       ├── chapter_1.md
│       ├── SUMMARY.md
│       └── theme
│           ├── book.css
│           ├── book.js
│           ├── favicon.png
│           ├── highlight.css
│           ├── highlight.js
│           └── index.hbs
├── Cargo.toml
└── src
    └── lib.rs

Doing mdbook build inside the crate root (and not inside the book directory) gives me

 hello/
 ├── book
-│   ├── book
-│   └── src
-│       ├── chapter_1.md
-│       ├── SUMMARY.md
-│       └── theme
-│           ├── book.css
-│           ├── book.js
-│           ├── favicon.png
-│           ├── highlight.css
-│           ├── highlight.js
-│           └── index.hbs
+│   ├── book.css
+│   ├── book.js
+│   ├── chapter_1.html
+│   ├── favicon.png
+│   ├── _FontAwesome
+│   │   ├── css
+│   │   │   └── font-awesome.css
+│   │   └── fonts
+│   │       ├── FontAwesome.ttf
+│   │       ├── fontawesome-webfont.eot
+│   │       ├── fontawesome-webfont.svg
+│   │       ├── fontawesome-webfont.ttf
+│   │       ├── fontawesome-webfont.woff
+│   │       └── fontawesome-webfont.woff2
+│   ├── highlight.css
+│   ├── highlight.js
+│   ├── index.html
+│   ├── jquery.js
+│   ├── lib.rs
+│   ├── print.html
+│   └── tomorrow-night.css
 ├── Cargo.toml
 └── src
-    └── lib.rs
+    ├── chapter_1.md
+    ├── lib.rs
+    └── SUMMARY.md

So it deleted my source file(s). It would be nice if mdbook detected that.

[azerupi]

Thanks!
That's not good, indeed. This is happening because build initializes a book if it doesn't exist already, I am not sure why the Rust files are being removed though.

I think we can do two things here:

• Ask for confirmation before initializing when running build
• Fix the bug that removes files

[Dushistov]

This things also happens with usage of "-d",
I use cargo's workspace with structure like this:

crate1
crate2
book

if I run mdbook build inside book all work fine,
but when I try put html files into root of worspace, mdbook delete entire workspace :(

cd book
mdbook build -d ../