Why is the cli not connected with the editor?

[Jody Hamilton]

I find it strange that there is no connection or even documentation between the cli and books made with the Gitbook editor.

There seem to be no commands to download a book you made in the editor. The only way I figured out to get a book out of the editor was to create a new Github repo, sync my gitbook with it, and then clone it. This was a hassle and also not documented.

Then I tried to use gitbook pdf command to generate a pdf. I soon found that there is a concept of 'plugins' I have to define in a book.json file. The process is apparently to get error messages, google them, and try to figure out which plugin I might need to add. Why on earth would my book.json file not already have the plugins used in the gitbook editor included in it? It feels as though there is no support for moving between the CLI and the web editor. This baffles me.

[Robin Ury]

As it says in the README of this repository, gitbook-cli is a legacy project that is separate from the new Gitbook SAAS.