vite-plugin-md-to-html

Vite plugin to convert markdown to html with front-matter extraction, build-time syntax highlighting, and relative image resolutions.

Try it out on StackBlitz

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Table of Content

• Installation
• Setup and Usage
• Options
• Type Declarations
• Features
  • Image Path Resolutions
  • Build-Time Syntax Highlighting
• Why New Plugin?

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🐥 Installation

npm install --save-dev vite-plugin-md-to-html

# OR

yarn add vite-plugin-md-to-html -D

👷🏻 Setup and Usage

vite.config.js

// vite.config.js
import { defineConfig } from 'vite';
import { vitePluginMdToHTML } from 'vite-plugin-md-to-html';

export default defineConfig({
  plugins: [vitePluginMdToHTML()]
})

test.md

---
title: Hello from front-matter
---

# Markdown File

main.js

// main.js
import testHTML, { attributes } from "./test.md";

document.title = attributes.title; // Hello from front-matter
document.querySelector("#app").innerHTML = testHTML; // <h1>Markdown File</h1>

⚙️ Options

Options type

export type PluginOptions = {
  markdownIt?: any; // markdown-it configurations
  syntaxHighlighting?: boolean; // set true to enable syntax highlighting. default false.
  resolveImageLinks?: boolean; // set true to resolve relative images in markdown. default false.
  highlightJs?: {
    register?: Record<string, any>; // to register new language to syntax highlighting.
  };
};

💙 Type Declaration

Add this to your global.d.ts to remove TS errors in markdown imports.

// global.d.ts
/// <reference types="vite-plugin-md-to-html/types" />

✨ Features

🏞 Image Path Resolutions

The relative paths in markdown will not work by default.

E.g. the following markdown will not render image because vite won't know about example.png file.

![Example](./example.png) # Where example.png is in the same directory

You can enable this using resolveImageLinks option.

import { defineConfig } from 'vite';
import { vitePluginMdToHTML } from 'vite-plugin-md-to-html';

export default defineConfig({
  plugins: [
    vitePluginMdToHTML({
      resolveImageLinks: true
    })
  ]
})

The above code will work as expected after this 🥳

🖊 Build-Time Syntax Highlighting!!

import { defineConfig } from 'vite';
import { vitePluginMdToHTML } from 'vite-plugin-md-to-html';

export default defineConfig({
  plugins: [
    vitePluginMdToHTML({
      syntaxHighlighting: true
    })
  ]
})

This will not include the CSS of syntax highlighting. You can-

Either import css from highlight.js npm package

import 'highlight.js/styles/github.css';

Or use it from CDN

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/highlight.js/11.4.0/styles/default.min.css">

Check out https://highlightjs.org/usage/ for more details.

🤔 Why New Plugin?

There are other plugins that you can use if you want to convert markdown to framework components.

• vite-plugin-md for markdown to Vue component

• vite-plugin-svelte-md for markdown to Svelte component

• vite-plugin-markdown for markdown to HTML, Vue, React, TOC
  This one in particular also supports turning markdown into HTML. However I was looking for a plugin where I can get markdown-to-html working without specifying any configurations and something that comes with default configs and is built for HTML output specifically.

• vite-plugin-md2html for markdown to HTML
  I found about this after building vite-plugin-md-to-html. It also supports markdown to HTML. Although, I countinue to maintain vite-plugin-md-to-html for features like syntax highlighting based on just boolean, or path resolutions in markdown.

I built this to make markdown integration easy with abell. however, the plugin itself is generic and not built for abell.