Markdown in Astro

Markdown is commonly used to author text-heavy content like blog posts and documentation. Astro includes built-in support for Markdown files that can also include frontmatter YAML to define custom properties such as a title, description, and tags.

In Astro, you can author content in GitHub Flavored Markdown, then render it in .astro components. This combines a familiar writing format designed for content with the flexibility of Astro’s component syntax and architecture.

Organizing Markdown files

Your local Markdown files can be kept anywhere within your src/ directory. Local Markdown can be imported into .astro components using an import statement for a single file and Vite’s import.meta.glob() to query multiple files at once.

If you have groups of related Markdown files, consider defining them as collections. This gives you several advantages, including the ability to store Markdown files anywhere on your filesystem or remotely.

Collections also allow you to use content-specfic, optimized API for querying and rendering your content. Collections are intended for sets of data that share the same structure, such as blog posts or product items. When you define that shape in a schema, you additionally get validation, type safety, and Intellisense in your editor.

See more about when to use content collections instead of file imports.

Dynamic JSX-like expressions

After importing or querying Markdown files, you can write dynamic HTML templates in your .astro components that include frontmatter data and body content.

---
title: 'The greatest post of all time'
author: 'Ben'
---

Here is my _great_ post!

---
import * as greatPost from '../posts/great-post.md';
const posts = Object.values(await import.meta.glob('../posts/*.md', { eager: true }));
---

<p>{greatPost.frontmatter.title}</p>
<p>Written by: {greatPost.frontmatter.author}</p>

<p>Post Archive:</p>
<ul>
  {posts.map(post => <li><a href={post.url}>{post.frontmatter.title}</a></li>)}
</ul>

Available Properties

Querying collections

When fetching data from your collections via helper functions, your Markdown’s frontmatter properties are available on a data object (e.g. post.data.title). Additionally, body contains the raw, uncompiled body content as a string.

See the full CollectionEntry type.

Importing Markdown

The following exported properties are available in your .astro component when importing Markdown using import or import.meta.glob():

file - The absolute file path (e.g. /home/user/projects/.../file.md).
url - The URL of the page (e.g. /en/guides/markdown-content).
frontmatter - Contains any data specified in the file’s YAML frontmatter.
<Content /> - A component that returns the full, rendered contents of the file.
rawContent() - A function that returns the raw Markdown document as a string.
compiledContent() - An async function that returns the Markdown document compiled to an HTML string.
getHeadings() - An async function that returns an array of all headings (<h1> to <h6>) in the file with the type: { depth: number; slug: string; text: string }[]. Each heading’s slug corresponds to the generated ID for a given heading and can be used for anchor links.

An example Markdown blog post may pass the following Astro.props object:

Astro.props = {
  file: "/home/user/projects/.../file.md",
  url: "/en/guides/markdown-content/",
  frontmatter: {
    /** Frontmatter from a blog post */
    title: "Astro 0.18 Release",
    date: "Tuesday, July 27 2021",
    author: "Matthew Phillips",
    description: "Astro 0.18 is our biggest release since Astro launch.",
  },
  getHeadings: () => [
    {"depth": 1, "text": "Astro 0.18 Release", "slug": "astro-018-release"},
    {"depth": 2, "text": "Responsive partial hydration", "slug": "responsive-partial-hydration"}
    /* ... */
  ],
  rawContent: () => "# Astro 0.18 Release\nA little over a month ago, the first public beta [...]",
  compiledContent: () => "<h1>Astro 0.18 Release</h1>\n<p>A little over a month ago, the first public beta [...]</p>",
}

The `<Content />` Component

The <Content /> component is available by importing Content from a Markdown file. This component returns the file’s full body content, rendered to HTML. You can optionally rename Content to any component name you prefer.

You can similarly render the HTML content of a Markdown collection entry by rendering a <Content /> component.

---
// Import statement
import {Content as PromoBanner} from '../components/promoBanner.md';

// Collections query
import { getEntry, render } from 'astro:content';

const product = await getEntry('products', 'shirt');
const { Content } = await render();
---
<h2>Today's promo</h2>
<PromoBanner />

<p>Sale Ends: {product.data.saleEndDate.toDateString()}</p>
<Content />

Heading IDs

Writing headings in Markdown will automatically give you anchor links so you can link directly to certain sections of your page.

---
title: My page of content
---
## Introduction

I can link internally to [my conclusion](#conclusion) on the same page when writing Markdown.

## Conclusion

I can visit `https://example.com/page-1/#introduction` in a browser to navigate directly to my Introduction.

Astro generates heading ids based on github-slugger. You can find more examples in the github-slugger documentation.

Heading IDs and plugins

Astro injects an id attribute into all heading elements (<h1> to <h6>) in Markdown and MDX files and provides a getHeadings() utility for retrieving these IDs in Markdown exported properties.

You can customize these heading IDs by adding a rehype plugin that injects id attributes (e.g. rehype-slug). Your custom IDs, instead of Astro’s defaults, will be reflected in the HTML output and the items returned by getHeadings().

By default, Astro injects id attributes after your rehype plugins have run. If one of your custom rehype plugins needs to access the IDs injected by Astro, you can import and use Astro’s rehypeHeadingIds plugin directly. Be sure to add rehypeHeadingIds before any plugins that rely on it:

import { defineConfig } from 'astro/config';
import { rehypeHeadingIds } from '@astrojs/markdown-remark';
import { otherPluginThatReliesOnHeadingIDs } from 'some/plugin/source';

export default defineConfig({
  markdown: {
    rehypePlugins: [
      rehypeHeadingIds,
      otherPluginThatReliesOnHeadingIDs,
    ],
  },
});

Markdown Plugins

Markdown support in Astro is powered by remark, a powerful parsing and processing tool with an active ecosystem. Other Markdown parsers like Pandoc and markdown-it are not currently supported.

Astro applies the GitHub-flavored Markdown and SmartyPants plugins by default. This brings some niceties like generating clickable links from text, and formatting for quotations and em-dashes.

You can customize how remark parses your Markdown in astro.config.mjs. See the full list of Markdown configuration options.

Adding remark and rehype plugins

Astro supports adding third-party remark and rehype plugins for Markdown. These plugins allow you to extend your Markdown with new capabilities, like auto-generating a table of contents, applying accessible emoji labels, and styling your Markdown.

We encourage you to browse awesome-remark and awesome-rehype for popular plugins! See each plugin’s own README for specific installation instructions.

This example applies remark-toc and rehype-accessible-emojis to Markdown files:

import { defineConfig } from 'astro/config';
import remarkToc from 'remark-toc';
import { rehypeAccessibleEmojis } from 'rehype-accessible-emojis';

export default defineConfig({
  markdown: {
    remarkPlugins: [ [remarkToc, { heading: 'toc', maxDepth: 3 } ] ],
    rehypePlugins: [rehypeAccessibleEmojis],
  },
});

Customizing a plugin

In order to customize a plugin, provide an options object after it in a nested array.

The example below adds the heading option to the remarkToc plugin to change where the table of contents is placed, and the behavior option to the rehype-autolink-headings plugin in order to add the anchor tag after the headline text.

import remarkToc from 'remark-toc';
import rehypeSlug from 'rehype-slug';
import rehypeAutolinkHeadings from 'rehype-autolink-headings';

export default {
  markdown: {
    remarkPlugins: [ [remarkToc, { heading: "contents"} ] ],
    rehypePlugins: [rehypeSlug, [rehypeAutolinkHeadings, { behavior: 'append' }]],
  },
}

Modifying frontmatter programmatically

You can add frontmatter properties to all of your Markdown and MDX files by using a remark or rehype plugin.

Append a customProperty to the data.astro.frontmatter property from your plugin’s file argument:
example-remark-plugin.mjs
```
export function exampleRemarkPlugin() {
  // All remark and rehype plugins return a separate function
  return function (tree, file) {
    file.data.astro.frontmatter.customProperty = 'Generated property';
  }
}
```
Added in: astro@2.0.0
data.astro.frontmatter contains all properties from a given Markdown or MDX document. This allows you to modify existing frontmatter properties, or compute new properties from this existing frontmatter.

Apply this plugin to your markdown or mdx integration config:

import { defineConfig } from 'astro/config';
import { exampleRemarkPlugin } from './example-remark-plugin.mjs';

export default defineConfig({
  markdown: {
    remarkPlugins: [exampleRemarkPlugin]
  },
});

import { defineConfig } from 'astro/config';
import { exampleRemarkPlugin } from './example-remark-plugin.mjs';

export default defineConfig({
  integrations: [
    mdx({
      remarkPlugins: [exampleRemarkPlugin],
    }),
  ],
});

Now, every Markdown or MDX file will have customProperty in its frontmatter, making it available when importing your markdown and from the Astro.props.frontmatter property in your layouts.

Related recipe: Add reading time

Extending Markdown config from MDX

Astro’s MDX integration will extend your project’s existing Markdown configuration by default. To override individual options, you can specify their equivalent in your MDX configuration.

The following example disables GitHub-Flavored Markdown and applies a different set of remark plugins for MDX files:

import { defineConfig } from 'astro/config';
import mdx from '@astrojs/mdx';

export default defineConfig({
  markdown: {
    syntaxHighlight: 'prism',
    remarkPlugins: [remarkPlugin1],
    gfm: true,
  },
  integrations: [
    mdx({
      // `syntaxHighlight` inherited from Markdown

      // Markdown `remarkPlugins` ignored,
      // only `remarkPlugin2` applied.
      remarkPlugins: [remarkPlugin2],
      // `gfm` overridden to `false`
      gfm: false,
    })
  ]
});

To avoid extending your Markdown config from MDX, set the extendMarkdownConfig option (enabled by default) to false:

import { defineConfig } from 'astro/config';
import mdx from '@astrojs/mdx';

export default defineConfig({
  markdown: {
    remarkPlugins: [remarkPlugin],
  },
  integrations: [
    mdx({
      // Markdown config now ignored
      extendMarkdownConfig: false,
      // No `remarkPlugins` applied
    })
  ]
});

Individual Markdown pages

Astro treats any supported file inside of the /src/pages/ directory as a page, including .md and other Markdown file types.

Placing a file in this directory, or any sub-directory, will automatically build a page route using the pathname of the file and display the Markdown content rendered to HTML. Astro will automatically add a <meta charset="utf-8"> tag to your page to allow easier authoring of non-ASCII content.

---
title: Hello, World
---

# Hi there!

This Markdown file creates a page at `your-domain.com/page-1/`

It probably isn't styled much, but Markdown does support:
- **bold** and _italics._
- lists
- [links](https://astro.build)
- <p>HTML elements</p>
- and more!

Frontmatter `layout` property

To help with the limited functionality of individual Markdown pages, Astro provides a special frontmatter layout property which is a relative path to an Astro Markdown layout component. layout is not a special property when using content collections to query and render your Markdown content, and is not guaranteed to be supported outside of its intended use case.

If your Markdown file is located within src/pages/, create a layout component and add it in this layout property to provide a page shell around your Markdown content.

---
layout: ../../layouts/BlogPostLayout.astro
title: Astro in brief
author: Himanshu
description: Find out what makes Astro awesome!
---
This is a post written in Markdown.

This layout component is a regular Astro component with specific properties automatically available through Astro.props for your Astro template. For example, you can access your Markdown file’s frontmatter properties through Astro.props.frontmatter:

---
const {frontmatter} = Astro.props;
---
<html>
  <head>
    <!-- ... -->
    <meta charset="utf-8"> // no longer added by default
  </head>
  <!-- ... -->
  <h1>{frontmatter.title}</h1>
  <h2>Post author: {frontmatter.author}</h2>
  <p>{frontmatter.description}</p>
  <slot /> <!-- Markdown content is injected here -->
  <!-- ... -->
</html>

When using the frontmatter layout property, you must include the <meta charset="utf-8"> tag in your layout as Astro will no longer add it automatically. You can now also style your Markdown in your layout component.

Learn more about Markdown Layouts.

Fetching Remote Markdown

Astro does not include built-in support for remote Markdown outside of content collections.

To fetch remote Markdown directly and render it to HTML, you will need to install and configure your own Markdown parser from NPM. This will not inherit from any of Astro’s built-in Markdown settings that you have configured.

Be sure that you understand these limitations before implementing this in your project, and consider fetching your remote Markdown using a content collections loader instead.

---
// Example: Fetch Markdown from a remote API
// and render it to HTML, at runtime.
// Using "marked" (https://github.com/markedjs/marked)
import { marked } from 'marked';
const response = await fetch('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wiki/adam-p/markdown-here/Markdown-Cheatsheet.md');
const markdown = await response.text();
const content = marked.parse(markdown);
---
<article set:html={content} />

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Markdown in Astro

Organizing Markdown files

Dynamic JSX-like expressions

Available Properties

Querying collections

Importing Markdown

The `<Content />` Component

Heading IDs

Heading IDs and plugins

Markdown Plugins

Adding remark and rehype plugins

Customizing a plugin

Modifying frontmatter programmatically

Extending Markdown config from MDX

Individual Markdown pages

Frontmatter `layout` property

Fetching Remote Markdown

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Markdown in Astro

Organizing Markdown files

Dynamic JSX-like expressions

Available Properties

Querying collections

Importing Markdown

The <Content /> Component

Heading IDs

Heading IDs and plugins

Markdown Plugins

Adding remark and rehype plugins

Customizing a plugin

Modifying frontmatter programmatically

Extending Markdown config from MDX

Individual Markdown pages

Frontmatter layout property

Fetching Remote Markdown

The `<Content />` Component

Frontmatter `layout` property