Announcing MarkdownDB: an open source tool to create an SQL API to your markdown files! 🚀

Hello, dear readers!

We're excited to announce the official launch of MarkdownDB, an open source library to transform markdown content into sql-queryable data. Get a rich SQL API to your markdown files in seconds and build rich markdown-powered sites easily and reliably.

We've also created a new dedicated website:

https://markdowndb.com/

🔍 What is MarkdownDB?

MarkdownDB transforms your Markdown content into a queryable, lightweight SQLite database. Imagine being able to treat your collection of markdown files like entries in a database! Ever thought about fetching documents with specific tags or created in the past week? Or, say, pulling up all tasks across documents marked with the "⏭️" emoji? With MarkdownDB, all of this (and more) is not just possible, but a breeze.

🌟 Features

• Rich metadata extracted including frontmatter, links and more.
• Lightweight and fast indexing 1000s of files in seconds.
• Open source and extensible via plugin system.

🚀 How it works

You have a folder of markdown content

For example, your blog posts. Each file can have a YAML frontmatter header with metadata like title, date, tags, etc.

---
title: My first blog post
date: 2021-01-01
tags: [a, b, c]
author: John Doe
---

# My first blog post

This is my first blog post.
I'm using MarkdownDB to manage my blog posts.

Index the files with MarkdownDB

Use the npm mddb package to index Markdown files into an SQLite database. This will create a markdown.db file in the current directory.

# npx mddb <path-to-folder-with-your-md-files>
npx mddb ./blog

Query your files with SQL…

E.g. get all the files with with tag a.

SELECT files.*
FROM files
INNER JOIN file_tags ON files._id = file_tags.file
WHERE file_tags.tag = 'a'

…or using MarkdownDB Node.js API in a framework of your choice!

Use our Node API to query your data for your blog, wiki, docs, digital garden, or anything you want!

E.g. here is an example of a Next.js page:

// @/pages/blog/index.js
import React from 'react';
import clientPromise from '@/lib/mddb.mjs';

export default function Blog({ blogs }) {
  return (
    <div>
      <h1>Blog</h1>
      <ul>
        {blogs.map((blog) => (
          <li key={blog.id}>
            <a href={blog.url_path}>{blog.title}</a>
          </li>
        ))}
      </ul>
    </div>
  );
}

export const getStaticProps = async () => {
  const mddb = await clientPromise;
  // get all files that are not marked as draft in the frontmatter
  const blogFiles = await mddb.getFiles({
    frontmatter: {
      draft: false,
    },
  });

  const blogsList = blogFiles.map(({ metadata, url_path }) => ({
    ...metadata,
    url_path,
  }));

  return {
    props: {
      blogs: blogsList,
    },
  };
};

And the imported library with MarkdownDB database connection:

// @/lib/mddb.mjs
import { MarkdownDB } from 'mddb';

const dbPath = 'markdown.db';

const client = new MarkdownDB({
  client: 'sqlite3',
  connection: {
    filename: dbPath,
  },
});

const clientPromise = client.init();

export default clientPromise;

Build your blog, wiki, docs, digital garden, or anything you want

And share it with the world!

👉 Read the full tutorial

Find out more on our new official website: https://markdowndb.com/

Check out the source on GitHub: https://github.com/datopian/markdowndb

— Ola Rubaj, Developer at Datopian