File system based routing for digital gardening with Vitepress

A Vitepress extension for automatic navigation generation for any markdown data collection.

This is vitepress-pages v.2.0 documentation, which is suitable for Vitepress v.1.0-beta.1 and higher. For v.1.x docs go https://www.npmjs.com/package/vitepress-pages/v/1.0.5

What does it do?

It helps you generate navigation data: page hierarchy, parents, siblings and children for any given page using Vitepress built-in functionality.

In components

Import the usePages, useChildren, useParents or useSiblings from vitepress-pages and get reactive computed values to build your own navigation interface.

In data-loaders

With Vitepress 1.0 we got the build-time data loading that give a list of all markdown pages with a glob pattern with the createContentLoader within special *.data.js files.

You can use the vitepress-pages/media default export function to go through the raw routes to optimize all the used mediaTypes images and copy them to the publicFolder/mediaFolder path. The script will take an image path relative to a given the .md file, optimize it with sharp.js and change the frontmatter media URL to match the new static image location. This is really helpful to generate have illustrated blogs and much more.

In config

There's a configurable opinionated transformHead() function generator to generate per-page head tags. You provide a config object and get a function that will return a bunch of SEO-friendly head tags. The script adds og: and twitter: meta-tags, as well as title, description and some other to all the pages correspondingly.

Installation

Add vitepress-pages as a dependency to your project.

pnpm i vitepress-pages

How to use

Put a *.data.js to the root folder of your digital garden.

pages.data.js

// We use the new Vitepress loaders feature https://vitepress.dev/guide/data-loading
import { createContentLoader } from 'vitepress'

// import the main transformer factory
import VPMedia from 'vitepress-pages/media'

// export the content data-loader for your markdown files folder
export default createContentLoader('./**/*/*.md', {
  
  //transform pages: optimize images
  transform: VPMedia({
    
     // Mandatory field
  root: new URL('../', import.meta.url),
  
  // Where are static files stored?
  publicFolder: "public",
  
  // Where to put the optimized images?
  mediaFolder: 'media_files',

  // What fields in the frontmatter contain pictures to optimize. The most useful are 'cover', 'icon', 'avatar', 'logo'. 
  mediaTypes: { cover: { size: 1200, height: 1000, fit: "inside", webp: false } }
  })
})

Usage

You can use the usePages() function in your Vitepress extended default theme layout to have all the navigation primitives you need: parents, siblings and children.

.vitepress/theme/MyLayout.vue

<script setup>

// Default theme layout to extend
import DefaultTheme from 'vitepress/theme'
const { Layout } = DefaultTheme

// Composables to use
import { usePages, cleanLink } from 'vitepress-pages';

// The way to react to route changes
import { useRoute } from 'vitepress'

// Build-time data-loader
import { data } from '../../pages.data.js'

// Component to display pages in a list
import NavCard from './NavCard.vue';

// Composable to process route and data and return reactive computed lists of pages
const { children, parents, siblings } = usePages(useRoute(), data)
</script>

<template>
  <Layout>
    
    <!-- Extending the default layout - put parents list right into the nav bar -->
    <template #nav-bar-title-after>
      <nav id="parents" class="grid">
        <a v-for="parent in parents.slice(0, -1)" :key="parent.url" class="parent" :href="cleanLink(parent.url)">
          {{ parent.frontmatter?.title }}
        </a>
      </nav>
    </template>

    <!-- This block goes right after the page text -->
    <template #doc-after>

      <!-- Children list -->
      <nav id="children" class="grid">
        <NavCard v-for="child in children" :key="child.url" :page="child" class="child">
        </NavCard>
      </nav>

      <!-- Siblings pair -->
      <nav id="siblings" class="grid">
        <template v-for="sb in ['prev', 'next']" :key="sb">
          <NavCard v-if="siblings?.[sb]" :page="siblings?.[sb]" class="sibling">
          </NavCard>
        </template>
      </nav>

    </template>
  </Layout>
</template>

Display

Your card for displaying pages can be any level of complexity. Here's a basic one for you to build upon.

<script setup>
const props = defineProps({
  page: { type: Object, default: () => ({}) }
})
</script>

<template>
  <a v-if="page" :href="page?.url" :style="{ background: `url(${page?.frontmatter?.cover})` }">
    <div>
      <slot></slot>
      <h3>{{ page?.frontmatter?.title }}</h3>
      <h4>{{ page?.frontmatter?.description }}</h4>
    </div>
  </a>
</template>

Generate head meta-tags

.vitepress/config.js

//import the generator 
import generateMeta from 'vitepress-pages/head'

//define options
const metaData = {
  title: "My site",
  description: "On the web",
  site: "my-site.com",
  url: "https://my-site.com/", //the end slash here is mandatory
  repo: "https://github.com/my/site",
  locale: "en",
  icon: "path/to/icon.png",
  logo: "path/to/logo.png",
  image: "path/to/image.jpg", // used for og:image, should be 1.91x1 ratio
  color: '#cccccc',
  mediaFolder: 'media_files', //where are the media files generated by `vitepress-pages/media` located
  author: "me-myself", //your twitter handle
  tags: "list, of, tags",
  // add it if you use [umami](https://umami.is/) for stats
  umamiId: "xxxxxxx-xxx-xxxxx-xxxxxxxx",
  umamiScript: "https://stats.my-site.com/umami.js"
};

// set your Vitepress config
export default defineConfig({
  title: meta.title,
  description: meta.description,
  lang: meta.locale,
  outDir: "dist",
  themeConfig: {
    repo: meta.repo,
    logo: meta.logo,
    color: meta.color
  },
  // Add this line to get head tags generated
  transformHead: generateMeta(meta)
});

Enjoy your digital garden being published online!