coursevault-preview

A small utility for previewing course material files from a configured directory. Useful for internal tooling in a university setting where you need to inspect .txt, .md, and .json files from a consistent base path.

Installation

npm install coursevault-preview

Library API

import { createCoursevaultPreview } from "coursevault-preview";

const vault = createCoursevaultPreview({
  baseDir: "/path/to/course-materials",
});

// List all files recursively
const files = await vault.listFiles();
// → ["course-config.json", "notes.txt", "syllabus.md", "week1/lecture.txt"]

// Get file metadata
const meta = await vault.getFileMetadata("syllabus.md");
// → { relativePath: "syllabus.md", filename: "syllabus.md", extension: ".md",
//     sizeBytes: 842, modifiedAt: Date }

// Read raw file content
const raw = await vault.readFile("course-config.json");

// Preview a file (plain text, stripped markdown, or pretty-printed JSON)
const preview = await vault.previewFile("syllabus.md");
// → { relativePath: "syllabus.md", format: "md", content: "CS 401 ..." }

createCoursevaultPreview(options)

| Option | Type | Description | | --------- | -------- | --------------------------------------------- | | baseDir | string | Absolute path to the course materials directory |

Returns a CoursevaultPreview object with four async methods.

listFiles()

Returns a sorted array of relative file paths under baseDir, searched recursively.

getFileMetadata(relativePath)

Returns a FileMetadata object:

interface FileMetadata {
  relativePath: string;
  filename: string;
  extension: string;   // e.g. ".md"
  sizeBytes: number;
  modifiedAt: Date;
}

readFile(relativePath)

Returns the raw UTF-8 content of the file as a string.

previewFile(relativePath)

Returns a PreviewResult for supported file types (.txt, .md, .json):

interface PreviewResult {
  relativePath: string;
  format: "txt" | "md" | "json";
  content: string;
}

• .txt — returned as-is.
• .md — Markdown syntax is stripped; the result is a readable plain-text summary. No browser renderer.
• .json — pretty-printed with 2-space indentation.

CLI

# List files (uses cwd as base, or pass --dir)
coursevault-preview --dir ./fixtures list

# Show file metadata
coursevault-preview --dir ./fixtures meta syllabus.md

# Print raw file content
coursevault-preview --dir ./fixtures read notes.txt

# Print a processed preview
coursevault-preview --dir ./fixtures preview course-config.json

All commands accept -d / --dir <path> to set the base directory. Defaults to the current working directory.

Development

npm install
npm run build      # compile TypeScript → dist/
npm test           # run unit tests with vitest
npm run typecheck  # tsc type-check without emitting
npm run lint       # eslint

The fixtures/ directory contains sample course files you can use for manual testing:

fixtures/
  notes.txt
  syllabus.md
  course-config.json
  week1/
    lecture.txt

License

MIT