Markdown

Markdown’s easy-to-write, easy-to-read, format is useful and popular for writing on the web.

Why?

Harp includes the common, useful preprocessors by default. This means you don’t have to waste time converting your Markdown into HTML—everything just works. Plus, Jade and EJS files can import Markdown files as Partials, allowing you to effectively re-use your writing.

Usage

Harp’s asset pipeline is easy to use. All preprocessing happens implicitly, so there is nothing to setup. Just name your file with an .md extension, and the Harp web server will serve it as a .html file.

Some implementations of Markdown will also allow .markdown, .mdown, .txt or other extensions to denote a Markdown file. Harp only preprocesses .md file.

Example

This project contains, an index.md and an about.md file in the root directory.

myproject/
  |- index.md
  +- about.md

Both index.md and about.md will be served as an .html file. So, requests to the following paths will all work:

/
/index
/index.html
/about
/about.html

Running Harp’s compile step will also export the file as index.html and about.html.

GitHub Flavoured Markdown

Harp also supports the supplementary GitHub Flavoured Markdown syntax. (This doesn’t include the GitHub-specific features, like Task Lists, @mentions, etc.) This allows you to write fenced code blocks:

```
function test() {
  console.log("Hello, world");
}
```

You may also specify the code language:

```javascript
function test() {
  console.log("Hello, world");
}
```

function test() {
  console.log("Hello, world");
}

Harp will serve the code block as HTML:

<pre><code class="language-javascript">function test() {
  console.log(&quot;Hello, world&quot;);
}</code></pre>

The language- class name follows the W3C and WHATWG convention for specifying the type of code. This also allows you to style it with a client-side syntax highlighting library, like Prism.

Managing File Extension

You may find yourself wanting to create another, markup-based file other than .html using Markdown. No problem: just prefix .md with the extension of your choice. For example, feed.xml.md will be served by Harp as feed.xml instead.

This is also possible, and much more useful, with EJS and Jade.