markdown-it/docs/development.md

Development recommendations

Prior to continue, make sure you've readed:

1. README
2. API documentation
3. Architecture description

General considerations for plugins.

1. Try to understand, where your plugin rule sould be located.

• Will it conflict with existing markup (by priority)?
  • If yes - you need to write inline or block rule.
  • If no - you can morth tokens in core chain.
• Remember, that tokens morphing in core is always more simple than writing block / inline rules (if you don't copy existing one). However, block & inline rules are usually faster.
• Sometime it's enougth to modify renderer only (for example, to add header IDs or target="_blank" for the links).

2. Search existing plugins or rules, doing something similar. It can me more simple to modify existing code, instead of writing from scratch.
3. If you did all steps above, but still has questions - ask in tracker. But, please:
   • Be specific. Generic questions like "how to do plugins" and "how to learn programming" are not accepted.
   • Don't ask us to break CommonMark specification. Such things should be discussed first on CommonMark forum.

Notes for NPM packages

To simplify search:

• add to package.json keyswords markdown-it and markdown-it-plugin for plugins
• add keyword markdown-it for any other related packages.

FAQ

I need async rule, how to do it?

Sorry. You can't do it directly. All complex parsers are sync by nature. But you can use workarounds:

1. On parse phase, replace content by random number and store it in env.
2. Do async processing over collected data.
3. Render content and replace those random numbers with text (or replace first, then render).

Or you can render html, then parse is to DOM (or cheerio AST) and apply transformations in more convenient way.

How to replace part of text token with link?

Righ sequence is to split text to several tokens and add link tokens between. Result will be: text + link_open + text + link_close + text.

See implementations of linkify & emoji - those do similar things.

Note. Don't try to replace text with html markup! That's not secure.