starlight-md-txt

A community Starlight plugin to expose your documentation pages as raw, agent-friendly Markdown at .md.txt URLs (e.g. /get-started/quickstart.md.txt).

This is designed to help AI agents, LLMs, and search crawlers easily consume your documentation in a structured, clean format without navigation headers, footers, script code, or CSS wrappers.

Features

• Dynamic Routing: Automatically registers routes matching /[...slug].md.txt for all pages in your Starlight collection.
• AST-based MDX Transpilation: Rather than basic regex/bruteforce string replacement, it uses a proper AST-based Remark parser (unified, remark-parse, remark-mdx) to translate custom Starlight/JSX components into clean, native Markdown elements:
  • <Tabs> and <TabItem> components are converted into clean, bold headers.
  • <Aside> elements are translated into blockquotes.
  • <Card> and <LinkCard> blocks are transformed to standard headers.
  • MDX imports and JSX/MDX comments are completely removed.
• Selective Frontmatter: Retains only title and description in the generated YAML frontmatter block for agent efficiency.
• Draft Handling: Respects the draft frontmatter attribute by hiding draft pages in production builds (mirroring Starlight's default behavior), unless includeDrafts is configured to true.

Installation

Install the plugin using your package manager:

npm install starlight-md-txt

Usage

Add the plugin to your astro.config.mjs within the starlight integrations configuration:

// astro.config.mjs
import { defineConfig } from 'astro/config';
import starlight from '@astrojs/starlight';
import starlightMdTxt from 'starlight-md-txt';

export default defineConfig({
  site: 'https://your-site.com',
  integrations: [
    starlight({
      title: 'My Documentation',
      plugins: [
        starlightMdTxt({
          // Optional: include draft pages in production builds
          includeDrafts: false,
        }),
      ],
    }),
  ],
});

Now, when you run your build, all of your documentation pages will have a corresponding .md.txt file (e.g., dist/get-started/quickstart.md.txt) alongside the standard HTML pages.

License

MIT License.