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Blog; projects; about; React In Markdown (In React) Update, March 2019: This article is out of date.You can find my article on the new approach, using gatsby-mdx, here. This website is made with Gatsby.js, a static site generator for React.You can look at its source here.Gatsby packages up React components, Markdown files, and other assets, creating bundles of code that load as fast as possible. Changes are automatically rendered as you type. Implements GitHub Flavored Markdown; Renders actual, 'native' React DOM elements; Allows you to escape or skip HTML (try toggling the checkboxes above). Learn how to render plain markdown into React components using the React Markdown Component. Markdown Editor for React. A simple markdown editor with preview, implemented with React.js and TypeScript. This React Component aims to provide a simple Markdown editor with syntax highlighting support. This is based on `textarea` encapsulation, so it does not depend on any modern code editors such as Acs, CodeMirror, Monaco etc.

Read the README and browse the source on GitHub, or mess around with the live demo.

Markdown is a fantastic tool. It makes writing simple. Markdown documents are plain text, so you don’t need to worry about tags and HTML and all that. You just write. And when you need a <a>, or a <h1>, it’s already there. It’s like magic!

But say you’re writing a React app with pushState, and you don’t want your links to use <a> tags; they break your smooth navigation. You want them to use react-router or react-junctions’<Link> tags instead. And you’re shit outta luck, because you can’t. Or you couldn’t, before MDXC.

MDXC is a tool to make Markdown and React best buddies. Unlike traditional Markdown, MDXC produces actual JavaScript — not strings of HTML. MDXC lets you embed raw JSX within your Markdown, and even lets you import components and accept props. And to top it all off, MDXC lets you configure how each element is rendered, giving you all sorts of ways to confuse your users and also a few ways to genuinely improve their experience.

If you can’t tell yet, I’m pretty excited about MDXC. So please indulge me and take a gander at this example:

Example 0: Hello, {yourName}!

One of the things about React components is that they take props. And since MDXC produces React Components, MDX documents can have props too!

To use a prop within your document, just declare it at the top of your MDX file with a prop <propname> line. Once declared, it will be available within any {brace} expressions.

But how do brace expressions work? Actually, they’re almost the same as brace expressions in JSX. In fact, when your paragraph starts and ends with a matching pair of tags, they’re exactly the same — the entire paragraph is processed as JSX. For example:

MDXC will compile the above document to something like this:

But why is it that one of our paragraphs compiles to createElement('p', ...), while the other compiles to p(...)?

Factories vs. Elements

When you use <tags> in an MDX document, they’re treated exactly like tags in JSX. That is, they’re compiled to React.createElement(...) calls.

But what about the elements that are generated by Markdown itself; for example, <p> and <h1> elements? As you might have noticed from the example above, this markup is actually produced by factory functions. These functions take props and children, and return a ReactElement. Each factory function is kind of like a special createElement call for a single type of tag.

The advantage of factory functions is that they’re configurable. Unfortunately, this does add a teensy bit of complexity to the generated components. But this is ok, because it can also add a whole lot of awesome to your users’ experience.

Using `<Link>` components with Markdown

If you’re loading content within a React app, then in all likelihood your app is using HTML5 history through a library like react-router or react-junctions.

The great thing about HTML5 history is that it provides a way to navigate without reloading the page. The crap thing about it is that ye olde’ <a> tags will still reload the page.

If you want your content to feel snappy and nice, you’ll want to use <Link> elements instead. And happily, this is as simple as wrapping your Document component and replacing the default <a> factory with a <Link> factory.

Of course, the usefulness of factories is not limited to links. You can also use them to do cool things like adding anchor links to your headings, or even to replace code blocks with code editors. The world is your burrito.

MDX also let’s you do a bunch of other cool things — you can import external React components and even write their children in Markdown! But a reader can only stand so much excitement at once, and the docs are waiting for you 24-7. So let’s move on to how to actually use MDXC.

How to actually use MDXC

Why, I thought you’d never ask!

A tool wouldn’t be a tool if it didn’t include a command-line tool. So let’s start with the command line tool.

But with that out of the way, let’s talk about how you should actually use MDXC.

Webpack

If you’d like to use MDX within an existing React app, chances are you’ll want to use mdx-loader. To do so, just add it to your project and then update the your webpack.config.js. Bear in mind that MDXC outputs ES2015, so you’ll need to run the output through Babel if you want to support older browsers or Webpack 1.

Assuming you’re using Webpack 2, you’ll need to add an entry to your module.rules array:

Then import and use your components as you’d do with standard JavaScript!

But what if you haven’t got an existing React app? Or what if you don’t want an app, but want a website? In that case, I have another treat for you.

Sitepack

MDXC was originally created for Sitepack. But what is Sitepack?

Sitepack is a wrapper around Webpack. It gives you a way to add pages to your website using plain-old require(), it handles the nasty parts of Webpack configuration for you, and it does all this while performing the magic required to build a static HTML version of each of your pages. As it happens, my MDXC and junctions.js websites are built with Sitepack.

Sitepack’s documentation is still in its infancy (I’ll let you know via my Newsletter when it improves). But if your plan is to use MDX to write an actual website (you know, with pages and links and no “login” button), it is definitely worth trying out. To do so, use the sitepack-react-starter-kit — it supports MDX out of the box.

Once you’ve cloned, installed and started your Sitepack website, open your browser at http://localhost:4000 and start editing the md files in the content directory — changes will be reflected live! When you’re ready to release, build your site with npm run build. You’ll be a webmaster faster than you can say 1995.

The API. Or, `class MDXC extends MarkdownIt`

At its core, MDXC is just a wrapper around the excellent and highly configurable markdown-it project. This means MDXC has an API. It also means that the API is excellent and highly configurable. But probably not as excellent or highly configurable as markdown-it.

I won’t go into any more details here, but if you’re the type of person who likes details then the README has a little more info.

Contributing

MDXC is a young project. That means a lot of it is still pretty shit. Help would be greatly appreciated, especially in the following areas:

Improved tests
Refactoring existing code to be prettier and faster
Generating more concise JavaScript output

If you’d like to contribute, you can create an Issue or PR on GitHub.

But if tests and refactoring aren’t your thing, I’d still be pretty darn happy if you use MDXC to make awesome stuff. Or quirky stuff. Or whatever, really. Then tell me about what you’ve made so I can add it to the list.

Finally, if you’re not one of the over 9000 people who’ve joined already, join my Newsletter! I don’t send many e-mails. But when I do send e-mails, they’re guaranteed to contain useful information and/or tools that you don’t want to miss. And in return for your e-mail, you’ll get a bunch of free React and JavaScript cheatsheets the moment you join.

I will send you useful articles, cheatsheets and code.

I won't send you useless inbox filler. No spam, ever.

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Oh, and one more thing – I love hearing your questions, offers and opinions. If you have something to say, leave a comment or send me an e-mail at james@jamesknelson.com. I’m looking forward to hearing from you!

Declarative

React makes it painless to create interactive UIs. Design simple views for each state in your application, and React will efficiently update and render just the right components when your data changes.

Declarative views make your code more predictable and easier to debug.

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Component-Based

Build encapsulated components that manage their own state, then compose them to make complex UIs.

Since component logic is written in JavaScript instead of templates, you can easily pass rich data through your app and keep state out of the DOM.

Learn Once, Write Anywhere

We don’t make assumptions about the rest of your technology stack, so you can develop new features in React without rewriting existing code.

React can also render on the server using Node and power mobile apps using React Native.

A Simple Component

React components implement a render() method that takes input data and returns what to display. This example uses an XML-like syntax called JSX. Input data that is passed into the component can be accessed by render() via this.props.

JSX is optional and not required to use React. Try the Babel REPL to see the raw JavaScript code produced by the JSX compilation step.

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A Stateful Component

In addition to taking input data (accessed via this.props), a component can maintain internal state data (accessed via this.state). When a component’s state data changes, the rendered markup will be updated by re-invoking render().

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An Application

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Using props and state, we can put together a small Todo application. This example uses state to track the current list of items as well as the text that the user has entered. Although event handlers appear to be rendered inline, they will be collected and implemented using event delegation.