MarkdownWeb

This project is a web page generator that uses Markdown as the format. You can use wiki link syntax to link between different pages. It also supports editing of pages using a Markdown editor with preview support and syntax highlighting.

If you implement your repository you can also store page revisions (to get a complete wiki functionality).

Live demo which is generated from this documentation repository.

Screenshot

Features

• All basic markdown formatters.
• Fenced codeblocks (with language specified as in Github pages)
• Github table format
• Links between markdown pages
• Local images
• Markdown editor
• Save/Edit pages

Installation

Basic installation

install-package markdownweb

AspNet Core installation

Install the ASP.NET Core package: markdownweb.aspnetcore.

Add the following to ConfigureServices() in your Startup.cs:

app.UseMarkdownWeb(options =>
{
    // URL to serve the markdown pages from
    options.Path = new PathString("/doc");
    
    // Location on disk
    options.DocumentationDirectory = @"D:\websites\mysite\wwwroot\docs";

    // To use a git repos:
    options.GitRepositoryUrl = "https://github.com/your/repository";
    
    // Where in the repos that the markdown files are located.
    options.GitSubFolder = @"docs\";
});

That's it.

Customizing

MarkdownWeb supports view engine files and plain HTML.

View engine files

MarkdownWeb looks for Views\Shared\Wiki.cshtml per default, change it using options.LayoutPage. Custom views must be placed where view engines normally look for them (typically Views\).

The model type is MarkdownWeb.GeneratedPage.

To get the generated table of contents (using headings), use @Model.GetPartOrDefault("TableOfContents").

HTML files

The page path is relative to the content root (i.e. root folder).

The template must contain a tag named {Body} which will be replaced with the Markdown generated HTML. You can also add the tags {TableOfContents}, {Title} and {Abstract}

Manual installation

The PageService is the main class which takes care of all parsing. It do however need to know how to treat links and where it can load/store pages. It do therefore have two dependencies that you need to configure first.

IPageRepository

The abstraction for the datastorage. The built in storage is using the harddrive for storage. You should specify which directory the files can be stored in. The structure will mirror the structure you use when you create pages.

There is also a IPageRepository which pulls a git repository.

IUrlConverter

As the markdown pages can be placed anywhere in your web site structure the library needs to know where the pages is located to make it's wiki links url independent. That transaction is handled by the IUrlConverter interface.

For instance you might have the pages in http://yoursite.com/doc/ while all web site links in the pages are relative to the doc root (/). Thus when someone surfs to http://yoursite.com/doc/users/create/ the library just want to see it as /users/create.

Complete configuration

var repository = new FileBasedRepository(@"C:\Web\MarkdownPages");
var converter = new UrlConverter(VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolutePath("~/doc/"));
var service = new PageService(repository, converter);

Then you just need to pass an url to the service:

var htmlPage = service.ParseUrl(Request.Url.AbsolutePath);

.. or just markdown:

var htmlPage = service.ParseString("/doc/", myMarkdownDocument);