rollup-plugin-pages

Rollup/Vite plugin that can be used to extract metadata from a directory of markdown files with frontmatter (such as blog pages).
It can then be imported like any other module in your existing application to populate a router or a summary page.

Demo

rollup-plugin-pages.mazerty.fr is a React application that has been built around this plugin and features a table of contents and a basic router.
The source code is available on GitLab and can be used to bootstrap your own application.

Installation

You can add @__mazerty__/rollup-plugin-pages in your devDependencies yourself, or you can let your favorite package manager do it for you.
For example:

npm install @__mazerty__/rollup-plugin-pages --save-dev

Usage

Let's say you have a project with a file structure that looks something like this:

src/
  pages/
    1970-01-01_lorem-ipsum.md
    1970-01-02_dolor-sit-amet.md
tests/
package.json
rollup.config.js or vite.config.js

And let's say the frontmatter of your markdown pages looks something like this:

---
title: Lorem Ipsum
description: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.
---

Just add the plugin in your Rollup/Vite configuration file:

import {defineConfig} from "vite"
import pages from "@__mazerty__/rollup-plugin-pages"

export default defineConfig({
    plugins: [
        pages(__dirname + "/src/pages")
    ]
})

And Rollup/Vite will build a virtual module that you can import like any other module:

import pages from "virtual:pages"

The code of the virtual module would look something like this:

export default [
    {
        "import": () => import("src/pages/1970-01-01_lorem-ipsum.md"),
        "date": "1970-01-01",
        "key": "lorem-ipsum",
        "title": "Lorem Ipsum",
        "description": "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua."
    },
    {
        "import": () => import("src/pages/1970-01-02_dolor-sit-amet.md"),
        "date": "1970-01-02",
        "key": "dolor-sit-amet",
        "title": "Dolor Sit Amet",
        "description": "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua."
    }
]

• The date and key attributes are extracted from the filename (this is fully customizable through the filenamePattern parameter, see below).
• The title and description attributes come from the frontmatter, which can be any valid yaml mapping.
• The import attribute is a function that allows you to dynamically import the page into your application (see also lazy loading and code splitting).

You'll still need a library such as MDX or unplugin-vue-markdown to turn your markdown files into components, but this is outside the scope of this plugin :)
Check out the demo to see how it can be done with MDX.

Parameters

There are actually 3 parameters that allow you to customize the behavior of the plugin:

• absolutePath (string): absolute path to the pages' directory.
• virtualModuleId (string, optional): name of the virtual module, defaults to virtual:pages.
  Has to be unique, allows for multiple use of the plugin in the same project (i.e. for different directories).
• filenamePattern (RegExp, optional): regular expression for the pages' filenames inside the directory, defaults to /(?<date>.*)_(?<key>.*)\./ (regexr).
  Only named capturing groups are considered valid, regular capturing groups will be ignored.

Known issues

• #1 - Hot update behaves quite erratically