md-http

md-http

A simple, but robust, http server that hosts a single Markdown document over http.

I built this for hosting a basic reference page hosting links on my home network and I'm sharing this because I hope it can fulfill similar use-cases on other internal networks!

• Installation
• Deployment
• FAQ
• Markdown features

Usage: md-http [options...] <filepath>
  -css string
    	An optional css file path or url (http:// or https://) to serve in the output
  -debug
    	Enable debug logging
  -favicon string
    	An optional favicon file path or url (http:// or https://) to serve with the output
  -jsonlog
    	Switch to structured json logging
  -listen string
    	The socket address to listen on (default "0.0.0.0:8080")
  -title string
    	The HTML title of the page (default "Landing page")

All options also have an environment variable counterpart: MDHTTP_<option>=<value>.
More details about this binary can be found at the source repo: https://github.com/astromechza/md-http.

The screenshot below was taken when I ran the following: go run github.com/astromechza/md-http@v1.1.0 -css https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/water.css@2/out/water.css ./README.md.

Installation

You can run or install this in a few different ways. In all cases, check https://github.com/astromechza/md-http/releases for the latest version tag.

Compile and run directly with go run

Good for testing, but not that useful for deployment into a final environment.

$ go run github.com/astromechza/md-http@latest -h
go: downloading github.com/astromechza/md-http v0.0.0-20231021093316-0e979d460e44
Expected a single argument as the markdown filepath!

Usage: md-http [options...] <filepath>
...

Install inside your own Docker image

I don't host a Docker image for this binary. If you want to embed it in an image, use a multistep builder. See Dockerfile:

FROM golang:1-alpine AS builder
RUN go install -v github.com/astromechza/md-http@latest

FROM alpine
COPY --from=builder /go/bin/md-http /md-http
RUN echo "hello world" > markdown.md
ENTRYPOINT ["/md-http", "markdown.md"]

Git clone and build

If the above options do not work, because github.com does not resolve, or dependencies cannot be found, clone this repo and build with the vendored dependencies.

$ git clone https://github.com/astromechza/md-http.git
$ cd md-http
$ go build -o md-http .
$ ./md-http README.md

Deployment

We suggest:

• Build a container with any custom css (-css example.css) and favicon (-favicon example.ico) embedded.
• Customise the page title using environment variables (MDHTTP_title).
• Setup the liveness and readiness checks to point towards the /healthz route on the main interface.
• Configure the ingress or proxy to add caching, metrics, tracing, or any other value added extras.

FAQ

What if I want to serve a directory of files, not just 1?

Unfortunately, this isn't the project for you. You are probably looking for something more fully featured.

What if I want to host images as well?

Again, unfortunately that isn't a priority for this project. Host the image elsewhere and embed a link to it.

Alternatively, you can use raw html to embed a svg image (not visible on github):

Or a base64 encoded image (not visible on github):

What if I need TLS or authentication?

Put this behind a suitable TLS and auth proxy (Nginx, Apache, Traefik, Envoy, etc..). Adding this functionality directly to md-http would make it too complex to maintain.

What if I need extra headers injected for caching or other behaviors?

Again, put this behind a suitable proxy.

Markdown features

• Most regular common markdown features

• Tables

  Syntax	Description
  Header	Title
  Paragraph	Text

• Footnotes[^1]

• Definition Lists

  Term One : A definition of Term One

• Automatic header ids: example

• Autolinking: https://github.com

[^1]: The footnote content