Markdown JavaScript Viewer (mdjs-viewer)

mdjs (Markdown JavaScript) allows to execute code and show interactive demos within your markdown documentation.

This extension takes this functionality and enables it directly on github.com.

You can see live demos in

• Github Markdown files (like README.md)
• Github Issues (incl. edit preview, new comment preview, new issue preview)
• ... more is planned but not yet implemented

Intro

Security

Executing user code especially in github issues can be dangerous. This extension isolates code executing as much as possible. It can be considered as secure as any page that executes user code like codepen or jsfiddle.

The Security Measures are:

• not executing any code without user action (e.g. requires a click of a button first)
• shows demos/executes code within an iframe
  • that uses sandbox with the following settings sandbox="allow-scripts"
  • populates the iframe with a data uri
  • does not allow any requests (except unpkg) to got outside of the iframe

This prevents all known attack vectors. If you come up with new once please report them.

Warning

In order to function this extension modifies the CSP (Content Security Policy) for github.com with the following rules:

• adds to script-src
  • 'unsafe-inline' to execute code blocks within the mdjs iframe
  • unpkg.com to load user dependencies from within the mdjs iframe

Installation

Via Chrome Web Store

Go to mdjs-viewer on chrome web store.

Via GitHub

1. Download

   git clone https://github.com/open-wc/mdjs-viewer.git
   cd mdjs-viewer
   yarn

2. Go to Chrome Extensions (More Tools -> Extensions or chrome://extensions/)

3. Enable "Developer Mode" at the right top

4. Load unpacked at left top and select the mdjs-viewer

Demos

Enable the extension and visit the following pages

1. Readme of demo-wc-card
2. Issues of demo-wc-card

How does it work?

It adds a button show demo ▹ to markdown pages and issues. Once you press it will get the raw md text which then gets pass though mdjs and an extra plugin which replaces all imports (relative and bare imports) with unpkg.com urls with the ?module flag. This way all dependencies can be directly loaded in the browser without the need of any service.

Finally we create an iframe with the content of the mdjs html and js output.

Limits

In order to get the raw md content of an issues (only the first message not following comments) a request to api.github.com is required. This request is only needed if you actually click on the show demo ▹ button. There is a hard limit of 60 anonymous api calls to github per hour. For more an API key is needed. (You can not yet provide it to the extension 🙈 - feel free to open a feature request)

Issues/ToDos/Future work

• Even more security checks
• Support relative imports from not root md files
• Support relative links
• Support in github pull request
• Support npmjs
• Support gitlab
• Allow users to define on which urls mdjs-viewer gets loaded/executed