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Markdown Handler for Apache

August 10, 2010 at 1:00 PM by Dr. Drang

Here’s something clever: a way to have the Apache webserver automatically render Markdown files as HTML. It’s called Markdown Handler and is available in this GitHub repository.

It works by adding a couple of lines to your Apache httpd.conf file (or, alternatively, your .htaccess file) that assign a “handler” to files ending in .md or .markdown. The handler is a PHP script that passes the Markdown file through PHP Markdown Extra and wraps some boilerplate HTML around it before sending the result off to your web browser.

I learned about it from an RSS notice that appeared in my Google Reader this morning. Alan Lue, Markdown Handler’s maintainer, had started watching my PHP Markdown Extra Math repository.

1 In fact, he’s now using PHP Markdown Extra Math as his Markdown processor and loads jsMath in the <head> of the HTML wrapper.

Following the history of Markdown Handler backward in time, I see that Sam Minnée started the project in October of last year. Alan Lue forked it a couple of days ago.

If I weren’t committed to the idea that my PNotes personal wiki system should work without a server, I’d probably be rewriting it to use Markdown Handler. If you write everything in Markdown, as I do, it looks like a great way to run a small site.

  1. That’s my customization of PHP Markdown Extra to allow the entry of mathematical equations in a LaTeX style, with jsMath rendering the output. ↩

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