GLU - Decompose Markdown files into directories

Sometimes you'll encounter an article online with a bunch of helpful examples, or you're trying to write such an article without it being full of errors, and it would be very nice for the article to be the "upstream source of truth" from which an entire directory of files can be built.

Well, that's what GLU is for. You give it a Markdown file, it builds a temp directory with the files from the Markdown. This directory is cleaned up when the GLU process exits. In the meantime, you can check that everything is as it should be, run any commands you want, etc.

How does that work?

GLU looks for code blocks, like this one:

// hello.js

console.log("Hello, world!");

You'll notice that I specified a language for the code block (in Github syntax) and a filename within the code block, in a comment. Different languages have different comment syntax, which is why it's important to provide both the language and the filename comment. Given both, GLU can figure out where your file should be unpacked to.

If GLU isn't smart enough to figure out the correct filename, it currently defaults to filename.txt, which will be overwritten repeatedly if there are multiple code blocks attributed to filename.txt.

Finally, GLU does a bit of cleanup of your code blocks to trim out the filename comment, empty trailing and starting lines, and excessive whitespace. Some of those features will probably be configurable eventually. But for that hello.js example, you'd find a file that just contained the console.log line.

How do I run this?

# examples.sh

# Install glu via cargo, if you don't have it
# You can find a Rust+Cargo installer at https://rustup.rs/
cargo install glu

# Unpack files to a temp directory and open a bash shell.
# Files will be deleted when shell is closed.
glu path/to/markdown/file.md

# Bash is just the default, the command to run is an optional second arg.
glu README.md 'node hello.js'

# You can also download Markdown files from the internet easily.
glu https://maddiem4.cc/software/practice/calling_asm_from_c

What languages are supported for detecting filenames?

Right now, very few. You can help! My criteria for a v1.0.0 release is to have parity with the language support list of PrismJS, for the semi-arbitrary reason that Obsidian uses it, and I write my Markdown docs in Obsidian most of the time.

• Assembly
• Bash
• C
• CSS
• JavaScript
• Python
• Rust

Contributing

Clone the directory, tinker, make a PR. If you've used Rust and Cargo before, it shouldn't be difficult or surprising. If it is, it's probably for reasons I'd have a hard time anticipating.

Be aware that src/filetype.rs is probably the thing most people will care about contributing to, to improve language support. I'll accept these PRs very gratefully, but only if they include relevant tests! There are examples you can use as a starting point, so that's not as hard as it sounds.

As you can see by the LICENSE file, GLU is licensed under the GPLv3.