Global parameters

[Karlstens]

I'm very new to VitePress and learning the ropes, and enjoying many aspects of this fantastic project.

After reading through the available documentation that I could find, I was still stuck on a method of introducing global parameters into my docs. Perhaps I missed a chapter, or misunderstood the guides I've been reading... regardless, I set out this morning to resolve a workflow that at least allows me to move forward with a solution, albeit a hack-solution at that (or maybe it;s a perfectly acceptable one? 😁 )

This is a module I created that does a word-for-word swap during dev/build process. Here, you can see what I consider global parameters such as "$appversion", "$animal" and "$colour", with the intent for them to swapout with the value they've been assigned, "1.0.0", "Cat" and "Blue".

..vitepress\enhanceMarkdown.mjs

export default function enhanceMarkdown(md) {
    const replacements = {
        "$appversion": "1.0.0",
        "$animal": "Cat",
        "$colour": "Blue",
        // Add more replacements as needed
    };

    // Create a regex pattern from the keys of the replacements object
    const regexPattern = new RegExp(
        Object.keys(replacements)
            .map(key => key.replace(/[-\/\\^$*+?.()|[\]{}]/g, '\\$&')) // Escape regex special characters
            .join('|'), 'g'
    );

    const replaceText = (str) => {
        return str.replace(regexPattern, (match) => {
            return replacements[match];
        });
    };

    const defaultRender =
        md.renderer.rules.text ||
        function (tokens, idx, options, env, self) {
            return self.renderToken(tokens, idx, options);
        };

    md.renderer.rules.text = function (tokens, idx, options, env, self) {
        tokens[idx].content = replaceText(tokens[idx].content);
        return defaultRender(tokens, idx, options, env, self);
    };
}

I import my enhanceMarkdown.mjs file into my vitePress config as such;

./.vitepress/config.mjs

import { defineConfig } from "vitepress";
import enhanceMarkdown from "./enhanceMarkdown.mjs";

// https://vitepress.dev/reference/site-config
export default defineConfig({
	title: "My Amazing Site",
	description: "Sandbox Testing",

	// Register the markdownIt plugin
	markdown: {
		config: (md) => {
			md.use(enhanceMarkdown);
		},
	},
...
}

And I author my markdown content, including the global variables where I need them.

---
title: Yay Amazing!
---

## App Version $appversion

The current application version is $appversion.

My favourite thing is a $colour $animal.

Which renders as;

App Version 1.0.0

The current application version is 1.0.0.

My favourite thing is a Blue Cat.

My question, is this the way to go about working with vitepress when it comes to setting up global parameters / global variables in a vitepress project? Or, am I actually building a mountain out of a molehill for what I assumed to be an out-of-the-box feature that I've somehow missed, and there's actually a far simplier method to implement this?

Side quest: Assuming that what I've created is one way of resolving the problem, perhaps there's actually a better/simpler way to resolve this same requirement for global parameters?

Edit: Also worth noting this method so that the values can return as expected within a Codeblock.

https://vitepress.dev/guide/using-vue#unescape-in-code-blocks