Compiiile

Compiiile is the most convenient way to render a folder containing markdown files. Previewing and searching markdown files has never been that easy (it's really just a command away !) ✨

Preview

Check the live demo here: https://compiiile.me/

Purpose

I document everything in markdown and have always been frustrated not having a simple tool to just preview a whole folder, being able to search through it, make slides out of it, and get a production-ready build of all the files as a knowledge base. On top of that, finding a tool with a sweet and simple UI is not that easy.

That's what Compiiile does. And it does it hassle-free !

Features

• 📦 No config required, everything just works out of the box, without changing your files (resolves images and relative links (cross-references), print-ready rendering, ☀️ light and 🌛 dark themes)
• 🌱 Available everywhere with static files deployment: just host it somewhere and access it in any browser on your computer, phone or whatever you are using
• 🔗 Quick access to your files via the navbar and links to the previous and next file (with table of content generation)
• 📺 Display some files as slides
• 🔍 Full-text quick search with content preview
• ⚡ Hot-reload content preview as you edit it
• 🎉 Supports MDX files: add your own components to your documentation
• 💡 Can serve as knowledge base, and handles symlinks to reuse content
• 🔧 Customizable by env variables or config file, it's up to you
• 🌟 You get it, it simply does the job, period.

What Compiiile isn't

• It's not a markdown editor, there are already plenty available, just choose the one that works best for you, even the simplest text editor will do.
• It's not like VuePress, VitePress, Docusaurus or Notion. Compiiile's goal is to stay simple and stupidly easy without any configuration.

The goal is to help people rely purely on a language (markdown), not on any platform.

Installation

You can install Compiiile either globally or per-project:

Globally

Open a terminal and type one of these commands, whether using npm or yarn depending on which package manager you are using:

yarn global add @compiiile/compiiile # install globally with yarn
# or
npm install -g @compiiile/compiiile # install globally with npm

Per-project

Open a terminal inside the folder containing your markdown files. Then, add Compiiile as a local command using yarn or npm:

yarn add @compiiile/compiiile # install as a project dependency with yarn
# or
npm install @compiiile/compiiile # install as a project dependency with npm

Using Docker

First, copy the ./Dockerfile from this repo to your root folder.

Run the following commands:

docker build -t <custom-image-name> .
docker run -p 8080:80 <custom-image-name>

Replace <custom-image-name> with the tag you want. You should get Compiiile running on http://localhost:8080.

Using docker compose (with dev server)

First, copy the ./docker-compose.yaml from this repo to your root folder.

Then just run the following command:

docker compose up

You should get Compiiile running on http://localhost:4321.

Quick start

To make yourself an idea and quickly get started using Compiiile, here are some commands that you can run in your terminal to get Compiiile running with a couple of markdown files as tests:

mkdir test-compiiile && cd test-compiiile # creating a new folder and go into this folder
yarn global add @compiiile/compiiile # installing compiiile as global dependency using yarn
echo '# Test Compiiile\n\n> Here is a blockquote for you\n\n## Your markdown awaits below' > README.md # a first test file
echo '---\nasSlides: true\n---\n\n# Slide 1\n\n---\n\n# And this is slide 2' > slides.md # a second test file as slides
compiiile --title="📚 Compiiile" # running Compiiile for these 2 files

Et voilà, you should be able to preview your files in your browser 🎉.

Usage

Once installed, 3 commands are available to see your beautiful markdown files 👀:

• compiiile dev: creates a web server to check your markdown files (alias to only compiiile)
• compiiile build: builds all the files for you to serve them production-ready
• compiiile preview: preview your production-ready build

You can run the command you want in your terminal while being in the desired folder.

To use these commands inside a javascript project, you just have to add these commands to the scripts section of your package.json file like so:

{
	"scripts": {
		"dev": "compiiile dev",
		"build": "compiiile build",
		"preview": "compiiile preview"
	}
}

You can run these scripts by running yarn <script> or npm run <script> in your terminal (replacing <script> with your script name).

The build command builds your files in a .compiiile/dist folder at the root of your current directory by default. You can override this parameter (see below on how to use a custom configuration).

Write some markdown (Compiiile-specific parameters)

The goal of this project is to get it running without changing any markdown files already written. Yet, there are some things to consider to configure some files:

Slides

To make a file usable as slides, you only have to add this parameter to the frontmatter of your markdown file:

---
asSlides: true
---

If you are not acquainted with frontmatter, it's just some file-specific parameters that you can put at the very beginning of your file to be processed (make sure to separate frontmatter values from your content with an empty line after the last ---).

By adding the frontmatter parameter, the page will directly open up as slides.

To separate your slides, just separate the content of your markdown with:

---

There must be an empty line before and after the ---

You can also make fragments within slides by using 2 hyphens:

--

🌟 You can make your slides print-ready by adding the print-pdf query parameter to your page, like: https://compiiile.me/s/slides-preview?print-pdf.

Other frontmatter keys are handled:

• title: set the title to be displayed in the navbar and for SEO
• description: set the description for SEO
• textAlign: possible values are CSS text-align values (left, center, ...). This changes the default text alignment in slides. The default value is center.
• ignore : Boolean value (true or false) to ignore the current file and exclude it from Compiiile (the file is not ignored by default).
• hidden : Boolean value (true or false) to hide the file from the navbar and siblings links (the file is not hidden by default).

💡 You can override slides theme by passing it to a theme query parameter in your slide url (for example /s/slides?theme=light). See the theme config parameter below for valid values.

Routing

The home page of Compiiile (/) points to a README.md file located at the root of your folder, or fallbacks to an index.md file.

Custom configuration

Here is the list of parameters that you can set to customize Compiiile (none are required):

Parameter	Type	Description
title	string	The title to display on the top-left of the User Interface
description	string	The description that is rendered by default for the SEO
logo	string	The relative path of the logo to display in the TopBar and as favicon
logoUrl	string	The url to go to when clicking on the logo, defaults to the home page if not set
dest	string	The folder in which to build files, defaults to ./.compiiile/dist
siteUrl	string	The url of the website in production (without trailing slash), used for the SEO tag og:image
astroConfig	Object	Override default Astro config
data	Object	An object with data to use in MDX files (check use case below)
theme	string	The website theme, value can be : auto (default value: adapts to system preferences) | light | dark
useAutoTitles	Boolean	If set to true, use the first file heading as title to be displayed in the navbar and for SEO. Defaults to false
noIndex	Boolean	If set to true, the robots.txt file will disallow all routes, preventing indexation. Defaults to false
publicDir	string	The folder name in which you can serve public files, defaults to public
vite.server.fs.allow	string[]	Add local paths to vite's server fs allow list

You can use these parameters in 2 ways:

Script arguments

Config parameters can be passed by script arguments.

For example, if you want to change the title, just run Compiiile like so:

compiiile dev --title="My knowledge base 📚"

Config file

Another way to set default config parameters is to set them in a dedicated file named compiiile.config.js in the root of your folder.

This should export an object, like in this example that shows common use cases :

export default {
	title: "Compiiile",
	logo: "./my-logo.png",
	dest: "my-custom-build-folder"
}

⚠️ You should bear in mind that script arguments have priority over config file parameters.

💡 Compiiile uses c12 to load the config file, which allows to extend config values from other files. See the dedicated c12 documentation for more information.

Public files

If you want some files to be public, just create a folder named public at the root of your Compiiile folder.

For example, if you want to link to a local PDF in your Markdown file, you can put your PDF in your local public directory, in public/my-pdf.pdf. Then, all you have to do is creating a link in Markdown with an absolute path like so :

[Check the PDF](/my-pdf.pdf)

Use MDX

v2 of Compiiile allows you to use MDX files with Vue components.

Using components

Let's say we have Vue a component Test.vue making an API request and listing results:

<template>
	<div>
		<h2>Random users fetched from an API:</h2>
		<ul>
			<li v-for="user in users">
				{{ user.name.first }} <span class="uppercase">{{ user.name.last }}</span>
			</li>
		</ul>
	</div>
</template>

<script>
	export default {
		name: "Test",
		data() {
			return {
				users: []
			}
		},
		methods: {
			async loadUsers() {
				const res = await fetch("https://randomuser.me/api/?results=10")
				this.users = (await res.json()).results
			}
		},
		async mounted() {
			await this.loadUsers()
		}
	}
</script>

<style scoped>
	.uppercase {
		text-transform: uppercase;
	}
</style>

You can use it your MDX file like so:

import Test from "./Test.vue"

<Test client:load />

You should use Astro's client directives to load your component's script.

Use config data values

To use config values, you can access it by importing the site variable in your MDX file and then access the data key:

import { site } from "virtual:compiiile"

# {site.data.someProperty}

Ignoring files and folders

To ignore a whole folder or some files matching a certain pattern, you can add a .compiiileignore at the root of the folder where you run Compiiile.

This file accepts glob patterns to ignore files. For example, if you want to ignore files containing the word preview and files starting with a number, you can simply put these 2 lines in your .compiiileignore:

*preview*
[1-9]*

Common issues

• Make sure that the absolute path to the folder where you are running Compiiile doesn't contain any special character as it could prevent the project initialization.

Special thanks

• Astro for enabling us developers to make lightweight websites
• fzf-for-js for the search feature
• reveal.js for displaying markdown files as slides
• Vite for helping modern frontend developers keep their mental health sane ❤️

Contributing

Contributions are welcome after discussing the object of your contribution in the Issues pages (because the goal is to keep this project really simple and straightforward).

You can read more about it and the roadmap in the dedicated contributing guide.

Official integrations & community projects

You can add features to Compiiile by using the following projects:

• compiiile-pro: Enhance your Markdown files, add diagrams, mindmaps, admonitions, and ready-made components
• compiiile-print: Add a print ready page containing all your Markdown files

Here is a list of projects related to Compiiile developed by the community:

• compiiile-actions-cloudflare-pages: A simple GitHub action to deploy a Compiiile site to CloudFlare pages

Support

Open-source is a wonderful thing, so please if you found this project useful or use it as a part of a commercial project, consider making a donation. You can do it either via GitHub donations or via my ko-fi page where you can make a one-time or monthly donation by PayPal or card. This allows you to use Compiiile as a pay-what-you-want service if you are not part of a non-profit project. But if you are making any revenue using this project or even use it as a trainer, making a donation would be expected. You can always contact me for a custom use of this project and any licence issue.

Thank you ❤️

License

This project is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v3.0.

See LICENSE.md.