eleventy-plugin-mdlite

Eleventy plugin that copies raw markdown files to your output directory and generates a SQLite index of all pages.

Features

• Raw markdown output — copies your .md source files alongside the rendered HTML so they're accessible at clean URLs (e.g. /docs/foo.md)
• Frontmatter stripping — YAML frontmatter is automatically removed from output files and database content
• Template processing — Nunjucks variables, filters, and includes are expanded in the output; unpaired shortcodes are executed; paired shortcodes are passed through as-is
• Custom header injection — optionally prepend a header (e.g. a comment or license notice) to each output markdown file
• SQLite index — generates a sqlite.db with FTS5 full-text search containing every page's URL, title, and content

Installation

npm install eleventy-plugin-mdlite

Usage

In your Eleventy config file (e.g. eleventy.config.js):

import mdlitePlugin from "eleventy-plugin-mdlite";

export default function (eleventyConfig) {
  eleventyConfig.addPlugin(mdlitePlugin);
}

Options

Option	Default	Description
dbFilename	"sqlite.db"	Name of the SQLite database file written to the output directory
pathPrefix	"/"	Only index pages whose URL starts with this prefix; database is placed there
header	""	String prepended to each output markdown file (e.g. a comment or notice)

eleventyConfig.addPlugin(mdlitePlugin, {
  dbFilename: "index.db",
  pathPrefix: "/docs",
  header: "<!-- This file was generated automatically. Do not edit. -->",
});

SQLite Schema

The generated database contains a pages table and a pages_fts FTS5 virtual table for full-text search:

Column	Type	Description
path	TEXT PRIMARY KEY	Page URL (e.g. /docs/foo/)
title	TEXT	Title from frontmatter
content	TEXT NOT NULL	Markdown source (frontmatter stripped)

Example Queries

Open the generated database with the sqlite3 CLI or any SQLite client:

sqlite3 _site/sqlite.db

Full-text search — find pages matching a term (results ranked by relevance):

SELECT p.path, p.title, f.rank
FROM pages_fts f
JOIN pages p ON p.rowid = f.rowid
WHERE pages_fts MATCH 'deploy'
ORDER BY f.rank;

Phrase search — match an exact phrase:

SELECT p.path, p.title
FROM pages_fts f
JOIN pages p ON p.rowid = f.rowid
WHERE pages_fts MATCH '"getting started"';

Boolean operators — combine terms with AND, OR, NOT:

SELECT p.path, p.title
FROM pages_fts f
JOIN pages p ON p.rowid = f.rowid
WHERE pages_fts MATCH 'api AND authentication NOT deprecated';

Search within a specific column — restrict matches to titles only:

SELECT p.path, p.title
FROM pages_fts f
JOIN pages p ON p.rowid = f.rowid
WHERE pages_fts MATCH 'title:setup';

Snippet extraction — return a highlighted excerpt around the matching term:

SELECT p.path, snippet(pages_fts, 1, '<b>', '</b>', '...', 20) AS excerpt
FROM pages_fts f
JOIN pages p ON p.rowid = f.rowid
WHERE pages_fts MATCH 'install';

The FTS5 index uses the unicode61 tokenizer for Unicode-aware word segmentation and case-insensitive matching.

Limitations

This plugin has only been tested with Nunjucks, Eleventy's default template language. Other template engines (Liquid, Handlebars, etc.) may not work correctly.

Requirements

• Eleventy 3.x (@11ty/eleventy ^3.0.0)
• Node.js with ESM support