gatsby-transformer-remark-frontmatter

Allows querying Markdown frontmatter fields as markdown

Install

npm i gatsby-transformer-remark-frontmatter

How to use

// in your gatsby-config.js
plugins: [
  'gatsby-transformer-remark',
  {
    resolve: 'gatsby-transformer-remark-frontmatter',
    // default: { blacklist: [] }
    options: {
      // frontmatter fields to exclude, including all others
      blacklist: ['templateKey']
      // frontmatter fields to include, excluding all others
      // whitelist: ['markdownField']
    }
  }
]

The options object has the following type

type PluginOptions = { whitelist: string[] } | { blacklist: string[] } | undefined

Note that providing both a whitelist and a blacklist is invalid.

All MarkdownRemark nodes will have a frontmattermd object added to the fields object, containing MarkdownRemark nodes created from valid frontmatter fields

Example

Given the following markdown file

---
templateKey: index-template
sidebar: |
  # Some Markdown Content
  ![My Fancy Image](../image.png)
---

# Main Content

Some Text

The following query can be used to get the body content and the sidebar markdown as html

query {
  allMarkdownRemark(filter: { frontmatter: { templateKey: { eq: "index-template" } } }) {
    html
    frontmatter {
      templateKey
      sidebar
    }
    fields {
      frontmattermd {
        sidebar {
          html
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

How it works

This plugin hooks into the onCreateNode api and listens for new MarkdownRemark nodes to be created. If the node has a frontmatter object and was not created by this plugin, we iterate through all of the valid frontmatter fields, creating a new FrontmatterMarkdownFile node consisting of the MarkdownRemark's File parent fields and the contents of the frontmatter field.

The 'gatsby-transformer-remark' plugin has an onCreateNode hook that recognizes that a new node was created with markdown contents. It creates a new MarkdownRemark node with the contents of the other node and links them as child and parent.

Once the FrontmatterMarkdownFile node has been created, the child MarkdownRemark node is found and attached to the fields.frontmattermd object in the original MarkdownRemark node.

Possible Issues

Many plugins expect all MarkdownRemark nodes to have File node parents. Because of this plugin, some MarkdownRemark nodes will have FrontmatterMarkdownFile parents. This plugin attempts to remain compatible by copying all of the original properties of the parent File node (if it exists) to the FrontmatterMarkdownFile node. This works in many cases, but will fail if a plugin checks the type of a node rather than the properties on the node.

Two functions are exported to allow checking if a node is a FrontmatterMarkdownFile node or a child of a FrontmatterMarkdownFile node. Use these predicates in cases where a plugin expects a MarkdownRemark node with a parent File node.