external-links.mdx

title	description	i18nReady	type
Add icons to external links	Learn how to install a rehype plugin to add icons to external links in your Markdown files.	true	recipe

import { Steps } from '@astrojs/starlight/components'; import PackageManagerTabs from '~/components/tabs/PackageManagerTabs.astro';

Using a rehype plugin, you can identify and modify links in your Markdown files that point to external sites. This example adds icons to the end of each external link, so that visitors will know they are leaving your site.

Prerequisites

• An Astro project using Markdown for content pages.

Recipe

1. Install the `rehype-external-links` plugin.

<PackageManagerTabs>
    <Fragment slot="npm">
    ```shell
    npm install rehype-external-links
    ```
    </Fragment>
    <Fragment slot="pnpm">
    ```shell
    pnpm add rehype-external-links
    ```
    </Fragment>
    <Fragment slot="yarn">
    ```shell
    yarn add rehype-external-links
    ```
    </Fragment>
  </PackageManagerTabs>

2. Import the plugin into your astro.config.mjs file.

   Pass rehypeExternalLinks to the rehypePlugins array, along with an options object that includes a content property. Set this property's type to text if you want to add plain text to the end of the link. To add HTML to the end of the link instead, set the property type to raw.

   // ...
   import rehypeExternalLinks from 'rehype-external-links';
   
   export default defineConfig({
     // ...
     markdown: {
       rehypePlugins: [
         [
           rehypeExternalLinks,
           {
             content: { type: 'text', value: ' 🔗' }
           }
         ],
       ]
     },
   });

   :::note The value of the content property is not represented in the accessibility tree. As such, it's best to make clear that the link is external in the surrounding content, rather than relying on the icon alone. :::

Resources

• rehype-external-links