grunt-frontmatters

Extract YAML front-matter from files to a single JSON file

The use case of grunt-frontmatter task is to strip all YAML front-matter pressent in multiple files (.html, .md, whatsoever) and combine them all in a single JSON file that can be loaded at once as a single file. It also is able to strip few firsts characters from each file to make a preview.

In addition to data already present in the YAML following fields are added:

• preview of the actual body content
• basename of the filename
• md5 with the md5 signature of the file body

The "frontmatter" task

Pretend you have a folder structure like this:

.
├── Gruntfile.coffee
├── component.json
├── package.json
└── source
    ├── articles
    │   ├── bellflower.md    <--
    │   ├── fiddler.html     <--
    │   └── lottery.md       <--
    ├── favicon.ico
    ├── index.jade
    ├── style.styl
    ├── styles
    │   ├── h5bp.css
    │   ├── main.css
    │   └── normalize.css
    └── templates
        └── h5bp.jade

Each file in the articles directory has a bit of YAML front-matter metadata, like the title of the article, author, and tags. We want just the metadata from all three to be combined into a single JSON stringified file, called articles.json.

Now grunt release will build a release folder that looks like this:

.
├── Gruntfile.coffee
├── component.json
├── package.json
├── release
│   ├── articles
│   │   ├── bellflower.html
│   │   ├── fiddle.html
│   │   └── lottery.html
│   ├── articles.json            <---
│   ├── favicon.ico
│   ├── index.html
│   └── style.css
└── source

Configuring your "frontmatter" task

In your project's Gruntfile, add a section named frontmatter to the data object passed into grunt.initConfig().

frontmatter: {
    release: {
        options: {
            minify: true,
            width: 60
        },
        files: {
            'release/articles.json': ['source/articles/*.md']
        },
    }
}

Options

options.minify

Type: Boolean Default value: false

If true, then the JSON.stringify is instructed to strip unnecessary linebreaks, making the resulting .json file smaller.

options.dirname

Type: Boolean Default value: false

If true, then each entry has the dirname entry and object keys are composed with dirname + '/' + basename.

options.width

Type: Int | String Default value: "sentence"

If it is an Integer no more than width charactes from the Markdown file's body is saved in the preview element. Trailing ellipses are not added. If it is "sentence" saves until the first ". ", if it is a String number + "s" (ex: "2s") it is the number of sentences.

If preview defined in the frontmatter of a file, it takes it as preview and ignores this option.

More Examples

See examples.