Markdown Quick Guide

What is Markdown? Markdown is a way to style text on the web. You control the display of the document; formatting words as bold or italic, adding images, and creating lists are just a few of the things we can do with Markdown. Mostly, Markdown is just regular text with a few non-alphabetic characters thrown in, like # or.
Video Players & Editors. Wear OS by Google. Markor: Markdown Editor - todo.txt - Notes Offline.

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R Markdown Quick Guide

Learn every Markdown trick, tip and app that you could ever possibly need. Writing with Markdown is one of the most powerful tools for online writers.

Both the Octopus blog and the Octopus documentation are written in Markdown and rendered using markdig. Markdig supports GitHub Flavored Markdown as well as some extra syntax.

Filenames

Markdown filenames are lowercase and end with .md. Use hyphens to separate words:

installation.md
backup-and-restore.md

Files and directories

Directories must have an index file: index.md.

directory/index.md
directory/another-file.md

YAML headers

The Markdown files in the blog and docs have a YAML header:

YAML header (blog)

YAML header (docs)

Use !toc within the body of a page to include a table of contents that lists the sections on the current page.

Headings

Use ## to create h2 headers and ### to create h3 headers.

The first header you include on a page must be a h2 header. The title of the page comes from the title in the YAML block.

Formating text

Bold text with ** on both sides of text to create **bold text**: bold text.

Italicize text with * on both sides of text to create *emphasized text*: emphasized text.

Images

Image filenames must be all lowercase.

Add images to an images/ directory in the same directory as the file that references the image.

Images are added to documents with the following syntax:

Images should include alt text for accessibility:

Control the size of the image in pixels by adding: width=500:

Lists

Bullet lists are written with a hyphen at the beginning of the line:

Which is rendered as:

Item 1
Item 2

Numbered lists are written with a number at the beginning of the line. The numbers do not need to increment as this will happen automatically:

Which is rendered as:

Item 1
Item 2

You can nest lists by adding three spaces before the nested list items.

Which is rendered as:

Item 1
1. Item 1.1
2. Item 1.2
Item 2

If you include an interruption between list items, you need to resume the list with the number the list should restart from:

Which is rendered as:

Item 1
Item 2
Item 3
Item 4

Tables

Tables are written in the following following way:

There are generators online you can use to make this process a bit easier, for instance, Table generator.

Navigation paths

When instructing users to navigate through multiple options in the UI, use the following syntax:

Which will be rendered:

Infrastructure ➜ Deployment Targets

Code samples

Use GitHub-style fenced code blocks. For example:

If your example uses multiple languages or files, you can combine them together to add tab headings:

Snippets are highlighted by Highlight.js

language	key
c#	cs
xml	xml
no format	no-highlight
command line	bash
powershell	ps
json	json
sql	sql
f#	fsharp
python	python
text	text

If no language is defined, highlightjs will guess the language, and it regularly gets it wrong.

Call-outs

To create a call-out that draws the reader’s attention, use the following syntax:

This will be rendered as:

There are several keys, each of which map to a different colored alert:

Key	Color
`success`	green
`hint`	blue
`warning`	yellow
`problem`	red

Call-outs are added through bootstrap alerts https://getbootstrap.com/components/#alerts.

Reuse text

To create reusable text that is automatically added to any document that references it, add the text to a new file and save the file with a key followed by .include.md. For instance, latest-version.include.md, and save the file to the docs/shared-content/ or blog/shared-content/ directory respectively:

If the complete filename is latest-version.include.md, to include the text in other documents, use the following everywhere you want the text to be included:

!include <latest-version>

When you use an include file in this way, you only need to update the text in one file and the updated text will be included anywhere it is referenced.

See Octopus snippets for more information on this topic and a library of ready to use snippets across repos.

Referencing Docker images

When referencing docker images, use the syntax:

!docker-image <org/image:tag>

This will be replaced with the most recently published version of the image.

Example 1 - with tags

!docker-image <octopusdeploy/octo:alpine>

Will be replaced with:

octopusdeploy/octo:6.17.3-alpine

Markdown Quick Guide Download

Example 2 - without tags

!docker-image <octopusdeploy/octo>

Will be replaced with:

octopusdeploy/octo:6.17.3

Link to the Octopus Guides

The Octopus Guides combine content to allow users to specify their entire CI/CD pipeline and access a guide for their specific pipeline. It is sometimes helpful to link to the guides with specific options pre-defined rather than the default options.

You can create the links to use by adding query parameters to the URL for the guides https://www.octopus.com/docs/guides:

Application: add ?application=PHP:
Build server: add ?build-server=jenkins:
Source control: sourceControl=TFVC:
Package repository: ?packageRepository=Artifactory:
Destination: ?destination=NGINX:

If you’d like to pre-fill more than one option, add multiple queries parameters to the URL:

https://octopus.com/docs/guides?application=PHP&buildServer=TeamCity&destination=NGINX

Redirects

If you delete or rename a file in either the docs or blog repos, you must add a redirect for that file otherwise publishing will fail.

Redirects are added to docs/redirects.txt and blog/redirects.txt files respectively.

The redirects.txt file looks like this:

In the above example, /docs/page1 is redirected to /docs/page2.

Add your redirect to the end of the file, after the redirect is added, the original file (page1) needs to be deleted from the repo.

Overview
Block Elements
Span Elements
Miscellaneous

Note: This document is itself written using Markdown

Overview

Philosophy

Markdown is intended to be as easy-to-read and easy-to-write as is feasible.

Readability, however, is emphasized above all else. A Markdown-formatteddocument should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without lookinglike it's been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. WhileMarkdown's syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTMLfilters -- including Setext, atx, Textile, reStructuredText,Grutatext, and EtText -- the single biggest source ofinspiration for Markdown's syntax is the format of plain text email.

To this end, Markdown's syntax is comprised entirely of punctuationcharacters, which punctuation characters have been carefully chosen soas to look like what they mean. E.g., asterisks around a word actuallylook like *emphasis*. Markdown lists look like, well, lists. Evenblockquotes look like quoted passages of text, assuming you've everused email.

Inline HTML

Markdown's syntax is intended for one purpose: to be used as aformat for writing for the web.

Markdown is not a replacement for HTML, or even close to it. Itssyntax is very small, corresponding only to a very small subset ofHTML tags. The idea is not to create a syntax that makes it easierto insert HTML tags. In my opinion, HTML tags are already easy toinsert. The idea for Markdown is to make it easy to read, write, andedit prose. HTML is a publishing format; Markdown is a writingformat. Thus, Markdown's formatting syntax only addresses issues thatcan be conveyed in plain text.

For any markup that is not covered by Markdown's syntax, you simplyuse HTML itself. There's no need to preface it or delimit it toindicate that you're switching from Markdown to HTML; you just usethe tags.

The only restrictions are that block-level HTML elements -- e.g. <div>,<table>, <pre>, , etc. -- must be separated from surroundingcontent by blank lines, and the start and end tags of the block shouldnot be indented with tabs or spaces. Markdown is smart enough notto add extra (unwanted)  tags around HTML block-level tags.

For example, to add an HTML table to a Markdown article:

Note that Markdown formatting syntax is not processed within block-levelHTML tags. E.g., you can't use Markdown-style *emphasis* inside anHTML block.

Span-level HTML tags -- e.g. , <cite>, or <del> -- can beused anywhere in a Markdown paragraph, list item, or header. If youwant, you can even use HTML tags instead of Markdown formatting; e.g. ifyou'd prefer to use HTML <a> or <img> tags instead of Markdown'slink or image syntax, go right ahead.

Unlike block-level HTML tags, Markdown syntax is processed withinspan-level tags.

Automatic Escaping for Special Characters

In HTML, there are two characters that demand special treatment: <and &. Left angle brackets are used to start tags; ampersands areused to denote HTML entities. If you want to use them as literalcharacters, you must escape them as entities, e.g. <, and&.

Ampersands in particular are bedeviling for web writers. If you want towrite about 'AT&T', you need to write 'AT&T'. You even need toescape ampersands within URLs. Thus, if you want to link to:

you need to encode the URL as:

in your anchor tag href attribute. Needless to say, this is easy toforget, and is probably the single most common source of HTML validationerrors in otherwise well-marked-up web sites.

Markdown allows you to use these characters naturally, taking care ofall the necessary escaping for you. If you use an ampersand as part ofan HTML entity, it remains unchanged; otherwise it will be translatedinto &.

So, if you want to include a copyright symbol in your article, you can write:

and Markdown will leave it alone. But if you write:

Markdown will translate it to:

Similarly, because Markdown supports inline HTML, if you useangle brackets as delimiters for HTML tags, Markdown will treat them assuch. But if you write:

Markdown will translate it to:

However, inside Markdown code spans and blocks, angle brackets andampersands are always encoded automatically. This makes it easy to useMarkdown to write about HTML code. (As opposed to raw HTML, which is aterrible format for writing about HTML syntax, because every single <and & in your example code needs to be escaped.)

Block Elements

Paragraphs and Line Breaks

A paragraph is simply one or more consecutive lines of text, separatedby one or more blank lines. (A blank line is any line that looks like ablank line -- a line containing nothing but spaces or tabs is consideredblank.) Normal paragraphs should not be indented with spaces or tabs.

The implication of the 'one or more consecutive lines of text' rule isthat Markdown supports 'hard-wrapped' text paragraphs. This differssignificantly from most other text-to-HTML formatters (including MovableType's 'Convert Line Breaks' option) which translate every line breakcharacter in a paragraph into a   tag.

When you do want to insert a   break tag using Markdown, youend a line with two or more spaces, then type return.

Yes, this takes a tad more effort to create a  , but a simplistic'every line break is a  ' rule wouldn't work for Markdown.Markdown's email-style blockquoting and multi-paragraph list itemswork best -- and look better -- when you format them with hard breaks.

Headers

Markdown supports two styles of headers, Setext and atx.

Setext-style headers are 'underlined' using equal signs (for first-levelheaders) and dashes (for second-level headers). For example:

Any number of underlining ='s or -'s will work.

Atx-style headers use 1-6 hash characters at the start of the line,corresponding to header levels 1-6. For example:

Optionally, you may 'close' atx-style headers. This is purelycosmetic -- you can use this if you think it looks better. Theclosing hashes don't even need to match the number of hashesused to open the header. (The number of opening hashesdetermines the header level.) :

Blockquotes

Markdown uses email-style > characters for blockquoting. If you'refamiliar with quoting passages of text in an email message, then youknow how to create a blockquote in Markdown. It looks best if you hardwrap the text and put a > before every line:

Markdown allows you to be lazy and only put the > before the firstline of a hard-wrapped paragraph:

Blockquotes can be nested (i.e. a blockquote-in-a-blockquote) byadding additional levels of >:

Blockquotes can contain other Markdown elements, including headers, lists,and code blocks:

This is the first list item.
This is the second list item.

Here's some example code:

Any decent text editor should make email-style quoting easy. Forexample, with BBEdit, you can make a selection and choose IncreaseQuote Level from the Text menu.

Lists

Markdown supports ordered (numbered) and unordered (bulleted) lists.

Unordered lists use asterisks, pluses, and hyphens -- interchangably-- as list markers:

is equivalent to:

and:

Ordered lists use numbers followed by periods:

It's important to note that the actual numbers you use to mark thelist have no effect on the HTML output Markdown produces. The HTMLMarkdown produces from the above list is:

If you instead wrote the list in Markdown like this:

or even:

you'd get the exact same HTML output. The point is, if you want to,you can use ordinal numbers in your ordered Markdown lists, so thatthe numbers in your source match the numbers in your published HTML.But if you want to be lazy, you don't have to.

If you do use lazy list numbering, however, you should still start thelist with the number 1. At some point in the future, Markdown may supportstarting ordered lists at an arbitrary number.

List markers typically start at the left margin, but may be indented byup to three spaces. List markers must be followed by one or more spacesor a tab.

To make lists look nice, you can wrap items with hanging indents:

But if you want to be lazy, you don't have to:

If list items are separated by blank lines, Markdown will wrap theitems in  tags in the HTML output. For example, this input:

will turn into:

But this:

will turn into:

List items may consist of multiple paragraphs. Each subsequentparagraph in a list item must be indented by either 4 spacesor one tab:

It looks nice if you indent every line of the subsequentparagraphs, but here again, Markdown will allow you to belazy:

To put a blockquote within a list item, the blockquote's >delimiters need to be indented:

To put a code block within a list item, the code block needsto be indented twice -- 8 spaces or two tabs:

It's worth noting that it's possible to trigger an ordered list byaccident, by writing something like this:

In other words, a number-period-space sequence at the beginning of aline. To avoid this, you can backslash-escape the period:

Code Blocks

Pre-formatted code blocks are used for writing about programming ormarkup source code. Rather than forming normal paragraphs, the linesof a code block are interpreted literally. Markdown wraps a code blockin both <pre> and <code> tags.

To produce a code block in Markdown, simply indent every line of theblock by at least 4 spaces or 1 tab. For example, given this input:

Markdown will generate:

One level of indentation -- 4 spaces or 1 tab -- is removed from eachline of the code block. For example, this:

will turn into:

A code block continues until it reaches a line that is not indented(or the end of the article).

Within a code block, ampersands (&) and angle brackets (< and >)are automatically converted into HTML entities. This makes it veryeasy to include example HTML source code using Markdown -- just pasteit and indent it, and Markdown will handle the hassle of encoding theampersands and angle brackets. For example, this:

will turn into:

Regular Markdown syntax is not processed within code blocks. E.g.,asterisks are just literal asterisks within a code block. This meansit's also easy to use Markdown to write about Markdown's own syntax.

Horizontal Rules

Markdown Quick Guide Examples

You can produce a horizontal rule tag (<hr />) by placing three ormore hyphens, asterisks, or underscores on a line by themselves. If youwish, you may use spaces between the hyphens or asterisks. Each of thefollowing lines will produce a horizontal rule:

R Markdown Quick Guide

Span Elements

Links

Markdown supports two style of links: inline and reference.

In both styles, the link text is delimited by [square brackets].

To create an inline link, use a set of regular parentheses immediatelyafter the link text's closing square bracket. Inside the parentheses,put the URL where you want the link to point, along with an optionaltitle for the link, surrounded in quotes. For example:

Will produce:

If you're referring to a local resource on the same server, you canuse relative paths:

Reference-style links use a second set of square brackets, insidewhich you place a label of your choosing to identify the link:

You can optionally use a space to separate the sets of brackets:

Then, anywhere in the document, you define your link label like this,on a line by itself:

That is:

Square brackets containing the link identifier (optionallyindented from the left margin using up to three spaces);
followed by a colon;
followed by one or more spaces (or tabs);
followed by the URL for the link;
optionally followed by a title attribute for the link, enclosedin double or single quotes, or enclosed in parentheses.

The following three link definitions are equivalent:

foo: http://example.com/ 'Optional Title Here'Note: There is a known bug in Markdown.pl 1.0.1 which preventssingle quotes from being used to delimit link titles.

The link URL may, optionally, be surrounded by angle brackets:

You can put the title attribute on the next line and use extra spacesor tabs for padding, which tends to look better with longer URLs:

Link definitions are only used for creating links during Markdownprocessing, and are stripped from your document in the HTML output. Printers for mac hp.

Link definition names may consist of letters, numbers, spaces, andpunctuation -- but they are not case sensitive. E.g. these twolinks:

[link text][a] [link text][A]

are equivalent.

The implicit link name shortcut allows you to omit the name of thelink, in which case the link text itself is used as the name.Just use an empty set of square brackets -- e.g., to link the word'Google' to the google.com web site, you could simply write:

And then define the link:

Because link names may contain spaces, this shortcut even works formultiple words in the link text:

Visit Daring Fireball for more information.

And then define the link:

Link definitions can be placed anywhere in your Markdown document. Itend to put them immediately after each paragraph in which they'reused, but if you want, you can put them all at the end of yourdocument, sort of like footnotes.

Here's an example of reference links in action:

Using the implicit link name shortcut, you could instead write:

Both of the above examples will produce the following HTML output:

For comparison, here is the same paragraph written usingMarkdown's inline link style:

The point of reference-style links is not that they're easier towrite. The point is that with reference-style links, your documentsource is vastly more readable. Compare the above examples: usingreference-style links, the paragraph itself is only 81 characterslong; with inline-style links, it's 176 characters; and as raw HTML,it's 234 characters. In the raw HTML, there's more markup than thereis text.

With Markdown's reference-style links, a source document much moreclosely resembles the final output, as rendered in a browser. Byallowing you to move the markup-related metadata out of the paragraph,you can add links without interrupting the narrative flow of yourprose.

Emphasis

Markdown treats asterisks (*) and underscores (_) as indicators ofemphasis. Text wrapped with one * or _ will be wrapped with anHTML  tag; double *'s or _'s will be wrapped with an HTML tag. E.g., this input:

will produce:

You can use whichever style you prefer; the lone restriction is thatthe same character must be used to open and close an emphasis span.

Emphasis can be used in the middle of a word:

But if you surround an * or _ with spaces, it'll be treated as aliteral asterisk or underscore.

To produce a literal asterisk or underscore at a position where itwould otherwise be used as an emphasis delimiter, you can backslashescape it:

Code

To indicate a span of code, wrap it with backtick quotes (`).Unlike a pre-formatted code block, a code span indicates code within anormal paragraph. For example:

will produce:

To include a literal backtick character within a code span, you can usemultiple backticks as the opening and closing delimiters:

which will produce this:

The backtick delimiters surrounding a code span may include spaces --one after the opening, one before the closing. This allows you to placeliteral backtick characters at the beginning or end of a code span:

A single backtick in a code span: `

A backtick-delimited string in a code span: `foo`

will produce:

A single backtick in a code span: `

A backtick-delimited string in a code span: `foo`

With a code span, ampersands and angle brackets are encoded as HTMLentities automatically, which makes it easy to include example HTMLtags. Markdown will turn this:

into:

You can write this:

to produce:

Images

Admittedly, it's fairly difficult to devise a 'natural' syntax forplacing images into a plain text document format.

Markdown uses an image syntax that is intended to resemble the syntaxfor links, allowing for two styles: inline and reference.

Inline image syntax looks like this:

That is:

An exclamation mark: !;
followed by a set of square brackets, containing the altattribute text for the image;
followed by a set of parentheses, containing the URL or path tothe image, and an optional title attribute enclosed in doubleor single quotes.

Reference-style image syntax looks like this:

Where 'id' is the name of a defined image reference. Image referencesare defined using syntax identical to link references:

As of this writing, Markdown has no syntax for specifying thedimensions of an image; if this is important to you, you can simplyuse regular HTML <img> tags.

Miscellaneous

Automatic Links

Markdown supports a shortcut style for creating 'automatic' links for URLs and email addresses: simply surround the URL or email address with angle brackets. What this means is that if you want to show the actual text of a URL or email address, and also have it be a clickable link, you can do this:

Markdown will turn this into:

Automatic links for email addresses work similarly, except thatMarkdown will also perform a bit of randomized decimal and hexentity-encoding to help obscure your address from address-harvestingspambots. For example, Markdown will turn this:

into something like this:

which will render in a browser as a clickable link to 'address@example.com'.

(This sort of entity-encoding trick will indeed fool many, if notmost, address-harvesting bots, but it definitely won't fool all ofthem. It's better than nothing, but an address published in this waywill probably eventually start receiving spam.)

Backslash Escapes

Markdown allows you to use backslash escapes to generate literalcharacters which would otherwise have special meaning in Markdown'sformatting syntax. For example, if you wanted to surround a wordwith literal asterisks (instead of an HTML  tag), you can usebackslashes before the asterisks, like this:

Markdown provides backslash escapes for the following characters:

+ plus sign - minus sign (hyphen) . dot ! exclamation mark

Filenames

Files and directories

YAML headers

YAML header (blog)

YAML header (docs)

Table of contents

Headings

Formating text

Images

Lists

Tables

Links

Anchor links

Navigation paths

Code samples

Call-outs

Reuse text

Referencing Docker images

Example 1 - with tags

Markdown Quick Guide Download

Example 2 - without tags

Link to the Octopus Guides

Redirects

Related pages:

Overview

Philosophy

Inline HTML

Automatic Escaping for Special Characters

Block Elements

Paragraphs and Line Breaks

Headers

Blockquotes

Lists

Code Blocks

Horizontal Rules

Markdown Quick Guide Examples

R Markdown Quick Guide

Span Elements

Links

Emphasis

Code

Images

Miscellaneous

Automatic Links

Backslash Escapes