The mdserver project needed page titles defined as YAML front matter inside markdown files, in the style of Jekyll and Hugo, instead of being generated from the file name. Rather than writing custom extraction code, I use Showdown’s built-in metadata support, enabled with a converter flag, and confirm the front matter leaves the HTML output unchanged...
This is a write-up of a small weekend project of mine: a Node.js/Express server that serves markdown files from a directory as HTML, using middleware to intercept requests for .md files and convert them with the Showdown library. I added a simple string-replacement template so the output is well-formed HTML with a proper page title. The code is on GitHub, with hardening and a possible Docker containerization left as future work...
