A diff viewer for markdown-formatted and plaintext documents.

These diffs are intended for use in copy-editing. The diffs are performed word-by-word, similarly to how the GNU wdiff tool works. This produces a more meaningful diff for English-language editing.

The diff may be further processed in a way that is aware of markdown formatting. The resulting output attempts to show differences of copy within the final document format (rather than differences of format).

The markdown-sensitive processing of the wdiff comparison is at ..., for the curious.

This is a complete rewrite of Dubdiff with:

• simpler project architecture
• client-side diffing engine and simplified server
• server-side rendering
• switch to React from Angular
• clean up of diffing engine
• goal of implementing a HTML diff viewer

Basically I'm rewriting it for fun.

The tool is live at http://dubdiff.com, feel free to use it there.

You'll need node & npm. Then install dependencies with

npm install

To build and launch a dev server:

npm start
npm run serve

To build and launch the production server:

npm run build:prod
npm run serve:prod

Data is saved to a simple flat file db in the data folder. If this folder doesn't exist, create it.

mkdir data

On a low-memory machine, eg. a DigitalOcean 512MB instance, you will need to enable virtual memory. Use this guide:

How To Configure Virtual Memory (Swap File) on a VPS

To make the application start on boot, run the following:

# initialize pm2 to start on boot with the systemd boot manager
pm2 startup systemd

# start the app with pm2
pm2 start npm --name dubdiff -- run serve:prod

# save the current pm2 config so that it can be reloaded on boot
pm2 save

Digital Ocean: How To Set Up a Node.js Application for Production on Ubuntu 16.04