How to make a plugin that make Parcel build a website from a bunch of Markdown files

[guoyunhe]

You may know docusaurus, a document generator based on webpack. I am trying to make something similar but simpler.

In a project, we have some markdown files:

README.md
CHANGELOG.md
docs/api.md
docs/cli.md
docs/get-started.md
docs/faq.md

And the Parcel plugin should scan *.md and docs/*.md. If parcel only supports *.html as entries, then the plugin must generates *.html entry.

My questions are:

1. How to run Parcel without an entry?
2. How can a plugin generate entry HTML file?

[mischnic]

1. Not really, but what you want instead is parcel build 'docs/**/*.md' README.md (list all files, also using globs)
2. You need a transformer that takes Markdown and outputs HTML, which is very easy to do but there's no such official plugin.

A heads-up: these two points are easy to solve, but the hard parts will be stuff like a sidebar or an RSS feed (so a page which lists multiple/all files in the build).

[guoyunhe]

Thanks for the info. I prefer to transform Markdown files to React components (use Parcel's MDX plugin). And the plugin should glue up these React components into a React app. So it need to generates:

index.html
index.js
App.js <- contains all necessary layouts and routes

If Parcel has to take an entry before executing plugins, I think I have to write my own scripts to create these missing files and then call Parcel?

[mischnic]

If you want to build multiple static HTML pages from your Markdown (like Eleventy), then you need what I wrote earlier.
If you want to create a SPA, then maybe do import * as pages from "./docs/**/*.mdx" in JS (with the glob resolver)?

[guoyunhe]

Yes, I think I need some glob matching. And this should be a configurable option. So users can choose what files they want to include. It is still an early idea. I can share more when I make some progress.

[TechQuery]

1. Not really, but what you want instead is parcel build 'docs/**/*.md' README.md (list all files, also using globs)
2. You need a transformer that takes Markdown and outputs HTML, which is very easy to do but there's no such official plugin.

A heads-up: these two points are easy to solve, but the hard parts will be stuff like a sidebar or an RSS feed (so a page which lists multiple/all files in the build).

@mischnic I try to build a SSG project with Parcel 2 glob entries, but nothing outputs with no error: EasyWebApp/mark-wiki#1

[valotas]

Had something like that working for my personal blog. The basic idea was to have a custom transformer that could read txt files. This file then can be a sitemap.txt containing all the different entry points you might need to create/publish and itself will be transformed to a "proper" sitemap.

The entry point for something like the above would be a transformer like this one.

It needs some work to make it more abstract and have it working standalone though.