rehype-svimg

rehype-svimg is a rehype plugin for preprocessing and lazy loading images using the svimg Svelte component. Image tags are replaced with the svimg component as a custom element, which means it can be used without Svelte.

Getting Started

Installation

npm install -D rehype-svimg

Since svimg (and by proxy rehype-svimg) uses sharp, you'll also want to make sure rehype-svimg is treated as an external by your bundler. For example, for Rollup, in rollup.config.js:

export default {
    external: ['rehype-svimg']
};

Since rehype-svimg generates svimg as a custom element, you'll need to make sure to include the custom element code in your client bundle wherever the rehype html content will eventually be displayed. For example, if you're displaying your Markdown as HTML in Sapper, you could include it in your client.js:

import 'svimg/dist/s-image';

Usage

Basic usage

rehype-svimg is a fairly standard rehype plugin. For example, to transform Markdown to HTML using svimg for images:

Example markdown content.

![My image alt text](assets/images/image.jpg)

More markdown content.

import unified from 'unified';
import markdown from 'remark-parse';
import remark2rehype from 'remark-rehype';
import rehypeSvimg from 'rehype-svimg';
import html from 'rehype-stringify';

const processor = unified()
    .use(markdown)
    .use(remark2rehype)
    .use(rehypeSvimg, {
        inputDir: 'static',
        outputDir: 'static/g',
        webp: true,
        avif: true,
    })
    .use(html);
const htmlContent = await processor.process(markdownContent);

By default, the plugin will only populate the component and its appropriate srcset attributes without actually creating the resized image files, instead expecting the resizing to have been already been done during build with a plugin such as rollup-plugin-markdown-svimg.

With image generation

It's possible to have remark-rehype do the actual image resizing. This avoids the need for a separate build plugin, but means the code will run significantly slower to do the resize. This might be acceptable for something like an exported static site, but could be problematic for something like a live production or development web server.

const processor = unified()
    .use(markdown)
    .use(remark2rehype)
    .use(rehypeSvimg, {
        inputDir: 'static',
        outputDir: 'static/g',
        webp: true,
        avif: true,
        generateImages: true,
    })
    .use(html);
const htmlContent = await processor.process(markdownContent);

Image widths

Images can be defaulted to a specific width with the width parameter. All images without an existing width will be explicitly limited in the srcset to this width:

const processor = unified()
    .use(markdown)
    .use(remark2rehype)
    .use(rehypeSvimg, {
        inputDir: 'static',
        outputDir: 'static/g',
        webp: true,
        avif: true,
        width: 500,
    })
    .use(html);
const htmlContent = await processor.process(markdownContent);

Images can also have their widths specified on an image-by-image basis, and this will be respected by rehype-svimg when generating the image srcset. An image-specific width will take precedence over the width option passed to the plugin.

Since Markdown does not have a standard syntax for specifying image width, the most straightforward way to do this is to use an actual <img> tag in Markdown, and use the rehype-raw plugin to handle the HTML in the markdown:

Example markdown content.

<img src="assets/images/image.jpg" alt="My image alt text" width="500" />

More markdown content.

import unified from 'unified';
import markdown from 'remark-parse';
import remark2rehype from 'remark-rehype';
import raw from 'rehype-raw';
import rehypeSvimg from 'rehype-svimg';
import html from 'rehype-stringify';

const processor = unified()
    .use(markdown)
    .use(remark2rehype, { allowDangerousHtml: true })
    .use(raw)
    .use(rehypeSvimg, {
        inputDir: 'static',
        outputDir: 'static/g',
        webp: true,
        avif: true,
    })
    .use(html);
const htmlContent = await processor.process(markdownContent);

Src Prefix

It's possible to specify a prefix that will be automatically added to every src before processing. This can be useful for serving images from subdirectories without having to type out the subdirectory for every image in the markdown. For example, images could be stored and automatically served from directories named based on the markdown file's directory.

posts/20200101/hello.md:

![Splash](splash.jpg)

import unified from 'unified';
import markdown from 'remark-parse';
import remark2rehype from 'remark-rehype';
import rehypeSvimg from 'rehype-svimg';
import html from 'rehype-stringify';
import { join, dirname } from 'path';

const filename = 'posts/20200101/hello.md';

const processor = unified()
    .use(markdown)
    .use(remark2rehype)
    .use(rehypeSvimg, {
        inputDir: 'static',
        outputDir: 'static/g',
        webp: true,
        avif: true,
        srcPrefix: join('images', dirname(filename)),
    })
    .use(html);
const htmlContent = await processor.process(markdownContent);

This configuration would read the file from static/images/posts/20200101/splash.jpg, write the processed images to static/g/images/posts/20200101/splash.{jpg,webp,avif}, and produce HTML from the markdown with an <Image> component that had srcsets referring to g/images/posts/20200101/splash.{jpg,webp,avif}, without needing to repeatedly type images/posts/20200101/ for every image in the markdown.

Configuration

Plugin options

Option	Default
inputDir	required	The static asset directory where image urls are retrieved from
outputDir	required	The output directory where resized image files should be written to
webp	see svimg	Whether to generate WebP versions of images in addition to the original image formats
avif	see svimg	Whether to generate AVIF versions of images in addition to the original image formats
width		Default width for images. Images that do not have a width set will use this width
generateImages	false	Whether to generate the actual resized image files in addition to the appropriate component attributes
srcPrefix		Prefix to add to every image url processed in the markdown
blur	see svimg	Amount of blur to apply to placeholder
quality	see svimg	Quality of the resized images
skip		An optional predicate function which can be used to skip processing images

Built With

• unified
• rehype
• svimg

Authors

• Chris Han - Initial work - xiphux

License

This project is licensed under the ISC License - see the LICENSE.md file for details