express-markdown-router

express-markdown-router

Express middleware for generating pages dynamically using markdown files. Say goodbye to explicitly bootstrapping routes in your Express app!

Installation

npm install express-markdown-router

Quick Start

You must be using an Express template engine to use this middleware

var express = require('express');
var markdownRouter = require('express-markdown-router');

var app = express();

app.set('port', process.env.PORT || 3000);

// Using the jade template engine
app.set('view engine', 'jade');

// Use the markdownRouter middleware and pass the directory of your .md files
app.use(markdownRouter(__dirname + '/pages'));

app.listen(app.get('port'), function() {
    console.log('Server started on port %d', app.get('port'));
});

This will start a server and build an index of routes based on the .md files found in the ./pages dir

It will then send the local var markdown from the parsed markdown file inside the index[.ext] view.

Routing

Currently there is one special route: index.md will map to the root path '/'

All other routes will map page.md to /page and page.subpage.md to /page/subpage and so on...

Additional Params

The view used to render the markdown files within will default to index[.ext]. You can change this by passing a second param to the middleware:

// Uses a view called 'markdown'
app.use(markdownRouter(__dirname + '/pages', 'markdown'));

Caching

All routes are cached on server start, but in development, the contents of the .md files will not be so you can freely update your pages on the fly before deploying them.