Making your own plugins

Warning

This part of the documentation will assume you have working knowledge in TypeScript and will include code snippets that describe the interface of what Quartz plugins should look like.

Quartz’s plugins are a series of transformations over content. This is illustrated in the diagram of the processing pipeline below:

All plugins are defined as a function that takes in a single parameter for options type OptionType = object | undefined and return an object that corresponds to the type of plugin it is.

type OptionType = object | undefined
type QuartzPlugin<Options extends OptionType = undefined> = (opts?: Options) => QuartzPluginInstance
type QuartzPluginInstance =
  | QuartzTransformerPluginInstance
  | QuartzFilterPluginInstance
  | QuartzEmitterPluginInstance

The following sections will go into detail for what methods can be implemented for each plugin type. Before we do that, let’s clarify a few more ambiguous types:

• BuildCtx is defined in quartz/ctx.ts. It consists of
  • argv: The command line arguments passed to the Quartz build command
  • cfg: The full Quartz configuration
  • allSlugs: a list of all the valid content slugs (see paths for more information on what a ServerSlug is)
• StaticResources is defined in quartz/resources.tsx. It consists of
  • css: a list of URLs for stylesheets that should be loaded
  • js: a list of scripts that should be loaded. A script is described with the JSResource type which is also defined in quartz/resources.tsx. It allows you to define a load time (either before or after the DOM has been loaded), whether it should be a module, and either the source URL or the inline content of the script.

Transformers §

Transformers map over content, taking a Markdown file and outputting modified content or adding metadata to the file itself.

export type QuartzTransformerPluginInstance = {
  name: string
  textTransform?: (ctx: BuildCtx, src: string | Buffer) => string | Buffer
  markdownPlugins?: (ctx: BuildCtx) => PluggableList
  htmlPlugins?: (ctx: BuildCtx) => PluggableList
  externalResources?: (ctx: BuildCtx) => Partial<StaticResources>
}

All transformer plugins must define at least a name field to register the plugin and a few optional functions that allow you to hook into various parts of transforming a single Markdown file.

• textTransform performs a text-to-text transformation before a file is parsed into the Markdown AST.
• markdownPlugins defines a list of remark plugins. remark is a tool that transforms Markdown to Markdown in a structured way.
• htmlPlugins defines a list of rehype plugins. Similar to how remark works, rehype is a tool that transforms HTML to HTML in a structured way.
• externalResources defines any external resources the plugin may need to load on the client-side for it to work properly.

Normally for both remark and rehype, you can find existing plugins that you can use to . If you’d like to create your own remark or rehype plugin, checkout the guide to creating a plugin using unified (the underlying AST parser and transformer library).

A good example of a transformer plugin that borrows from the remark and rehype ecosystems is the Latex plugin:

quartz/plugins/transformers/latex.ts

import remarkMath from "remark-math"
import rehypeKatex from "rehype-katex"
import rehypeMathjax from "rehype-mathjax/svg.js"
import { QuartzTransformerPlugin } from "../types"
 
interface Options {
  renderEngine: "katex" | "mathjax"
}
 
export const Latex: QuartzTransformerPlugin<Options> = (opts?: Options) => {
  const engine = opts?.renderEngine ?? "katex"
  return {
    name: "Latex",
    markdownPlugins() {
      return [remarkMath]
    },
    htmlPlugins() {
      if (engine === "katex") {
        // if you need to pass options into a plugin, you
        // can use a tuple of [plugin, options]
        return [[rehypeKatex, { output: "html" }]]
      } else {
        return [rehypeMathjax]
      }
    },
    externalResources() {
      if (engine === "katex") {
        return {
          css: ["https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/katex@0.16.0/dist/katex.min.css"],
          js: [
            {
              src: "https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/katex@0.16.7/dist/contrib/copy-tex.min.js",
              loadTime: "afterDOMReady",
              contentType: "external",
            },
          ],
        }
      } else {
        return {}
      }
    },
  }
}

Another common thing that transformer plugins will do is parse a file and add extra data for that file:

export const AddWordCount: QuartzTransformerPlugin = () => {
  return {
    name: "AddWordCount",
    markdownPlugins() {
      return [
        () => {
          return (tree, file) => {
            // tree is an `mdast` root element
            // file is a `vfile`
            const text = file.value
            const words = text.split(" ").length
            file.data.wordcount = words
          }
        },
      ]
    },
  }
}
 
// tell typescript about our custom data fields we are adding
// other plugins will then also be aware of this data field
declare module "vfile" {
  interface DataMap {
    wordcount: number
  }
}

Finally, you can also perform transformations over Markdown or HTML ASTs using the visit function from the unist-util-visit package or the findAndReplace function from the mdast-util-find-and-replace package.

export const TextTransforms: QuartzTransformerPlugin = () => {
  return {
    name: "TextTransforms",
    markdownPlugins() {
      return [() => {
        return (tree, file) => {
          // replace _text_ with the italics version
          findAndReplace(tree, /_(.+)_/, (_value: string, ...capture: string[]) => {
            // inner is the text inside of the () of the regex
            const [inner] = capture
            // return an mdast node
            // https://github.com/syntax-tree/mdast
            return {
              type: "emphasis",
              children: [{ type: 'text', value: inner }]
            }
          })
 
         // remove all links (replace with just the link content)
         // match by 'type' field on an mdast node
         // https://github.com/syntax-tree/mdast#link in this example
          visit(tree, "link", (link: Link) => {
            return {
              type: "paragraph"
              children: [{ type: 'text', value: link.title }]
            }
          })
        }
      }]
    }
  }
}

All transformer plugins can be found under quartz/plugins/transformers. If you decide to write your own transformer plugin, don’t forget to re-export it under quartz/plugins/transformers/index.ts

A parting word: transformer plugins are quite complex so don’t worry if you don’t get them right away. Take a look at the built in transformers and see how they operate over content to get a better sense for how to accomplish what you are trying to do.

Filters §

Filters filter content, taking the output of all the transformers and determining what files to actually keep and what to discard.

export type QuartzFilterPlugin<Options extends OptionType = undefined> = (
  opts?: Options,
) => QuartzFilterPluginInstance
 
export type QuartzFilterPluginInstance = {
  name: string
  shouldPublish(ctx: BuildCtx, content: ProcessedContent): boolean
}

A filter plugin must define a name field and a shouldPublish function that takes in a piece of content that has been processed by all the transformers and returns a true or false depending on whether it should be passed to the emitter plugins or not.

For example, here is the built-in plugin for removing drafts:

quartz/plugins/filters/draft.ts

import { QuartzFilterPlugin } from "../types"
 
export const RemoveDrafts: QuartzFilterPlugin<{}> = () => ({
  name: "RemoveDrafts",
  shouldPublish(_ctx, [_tree, vfile]) {
    // uses frontmatter parsed from transformers
    const draftFlag: boolean = vfile.data?.frontmatter?.draft ?? false
    return !draftFlag
  },
})

Emitters §

Emitters reduce over content, taking in a list of all the transformed and filtered content and creating output files.

export type QuartzEmitterPlugin<Options extends OptionType = undefined> = (
  opts?: Options,
) => QuartzEmitterPluginInstance
 
export type QuartzEmitterPluginInstance = {
  name: string
  emit(ctx: BuildCtx, content: ProcessedContent[], resources: StaticResources): Promise<FilePath[]>
  getQuartzComponents(ctx: BuildCtx): QuartzComponent[]
}

An emitter plugin must define a name field, an emit function, and a getQuartzComponents function. emit is responsible for looking at all the parsed and filtered content and then appropriately creating files and returning a list of paths to files the plugin created.

Creating new files can be done via regular Node fs module (i.e. fs.cp or fs.writeFile) or via the write function in quartz/plugins/emitters/helpers.ts if you are creating files that contain text. write has the following signature:

export type WriteOptions = (data: {
  // the build context
  ctx: BuildCtx
  // the name of the file to emit (not including the file extension)
  slug: ServerSlug
  // the file extension
  ext: `.${string}` | ""
  // the file content to add
  content: string
}) => Promise<FilePath>

This is a thin wrapper around writing to the appropriate output folder and ensuring that intermediate directories exist. If you choose to use the native Node fs APIs, ensure you emit to the argv.output folder as well.

If you are creating an emitter plugin that needs to render components, there are three more things to be aware of:

• Your component should use getQuartzComponents to declare a list of QuartzComponents that it uses to construct the page. See the page on creating components for more information.
• You can use the renderPage function defined in quartz/components/renderPage.tsx to render Quartz components into HTML.
• If you need to render an HTML AST to JSX, you can use the htmlToJsx function from quartz/util/jsx.ts. An example of this can be found in quartz/components/pages/Content.tsx.

For example, the following is a simplified version of the content page plugin that renders every single page.

quartz/plugins/emitters/contentPage.tsx

export const ContentPage: QuartzEmitterPlugin = () => {
  // construct the layout
  const layout: FullPageLayout = {
    ...sharedPageComponents,
    ...defaultContentPageLayout,
    pageBody: Content(),
  }
  const { head, header, beforeBody, pageBody, left, right, footer } = layout
  return {
    name: "ContentPage",
    getQuartzComponents() {
      return [head, ...header, ...beforeBody, pageBody, ...left, ...right, footer]
    },
    async emit(ctx, content, resources, emit): Promise<FilePath[]> {
      const cfg = ctx.cfg.configuration
      const fps: FilePath[] = []
      const allFiles = content.map((c) => c[1].data)
      for (const [tree, file] of content) {
        const slug = canonicalizeServer(file.data.slug!)
        const externalResources = pageResources(slug, resources)
        const componentData: QuartzComponentProps = {
          fileData: file.data,
          externalResources,
          cfg,
          children: [],
          tree,
          allFiles,
        }
 
        const content = renderPage(slug, componentData, opts, externalResources)
        const fp = await emit({
          content,
          slug: file.data.slug!,
          ext: ".html",
        })
 
        fps.push(fp)
      }
      return fps
    },
  }
}

Note that it takes in a FullPageLayout as the options. It’s made by combining a SharedLayout and a PageLayout both of which are provided through the quartz.layout.ts file.

Tip

Look in quartz/plugins for more examples of plugins in Quartz as reference for your own plugins!