gray-matter VS TypeScript

Writing in markdown is super convenient, and supported by just about any text editor. To convert these .md files to browser-ready HTML, I wrote a simple little Node.js script using two great npm packages called gray-matter and showdown.

Next, install gray-matter to extract metadata from the front matter of markdown files, and marked to convert the markdown files to HTML:

It turns out that Docusaurus uses an open source JavaScript parser called gray-matter to parse the front matter from markdown files! After installing gray-matter using npm and them importing it into the markdownUtils.ts file, all it takes is calling the matter method and passing the markdown file contents to get returned an Object with data and content (the data being the front matter and the content being the rest of the markdown file contents).

Although we are building a custom table of contents, we won't have to write everything from scratch. To separate the Markdown/MDX content from the front matter, we'll use the Gray-matter package. It is optional in case you don't have front matter in your Markdown files. To process the Markdown itself, we'll use the Remark package. We'll also need the unist-util-visit package for traversing node trees and mdast-util-to-string for getting the text content of a node.

In this article we walk you through the process of creating a simple blog app using the popular React framework NextJS, gray-matter and next-mdx-remote.

In order to get post information (such as author, title, date, etc.) from our HTML without having them be apart of our rendered post we need a way to parse YAML front matter, this is where gray-matter comes in hand.

It’s actually not part of the CommonMark spec, so you’ll often need a 3rd party library to parse it out on top of your Markdown parser. In JavaScript we use gray-matter which converts frontmatter into a JS object we can more easily use.

Over the past few weeks, I mostly wrote on how to template a Node.js application with EJS using Express. Then, I wrote an article showing how to create a Markdown blog in Node.js using EJS, Express, gray-matter and markdown-it. Today, I'll combine those tutorials to turn the Markdown blog, from the last tutorial, into a simple SSG.

gray-matter, to parse the front matter from the Markdown files

Luckily for us, there is a fantastic NPM package that can help us with this. Let’s install it.

GitHub | Website

Learning Curve and Developer Tooling sCrypt is an embedded Domain Specific Language (eDSL) based on TypeScript. It is strictly a subset of TypeScript, so all sCrypt code is valid TypeScript. TypeScript is chosen as the host language because it provides an easy, familiar language (JavaScript), but with type safety. There’s an abundance of learning materials available for TypeScript and thus sCrypt, including online tutorials, courses, documentation, and community support. This makes it relatively easy for beginners to start learning. It also has a vast ecosystem with numerous libraries and frameworks (e.g., React, Angular, Vue) that can simplify development and integration with Web2 applications.

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On top of that, Vite’s compiler is super fast, supports Typescript (which we of course used), and built just fine on our host, which was Cloudflare Pages. Cloudflare Pages is a super fast static website hosting service by Cloudflare, which allows your site to take advantage of their global CDN to make sure your site is as close to your users as possible. It supports nearly any JS framework you could want to use for your site, and can even host plan old HTML if you’re of that persuasion.

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