External renderers

Gitea supports custom file renderings (i.e., Jupyter notebooks, asciidoc, etc.) through external binaries, it is just a matter of:

• installing external binaries
• add some configuration to your app.ini file
• restart your Gitea instance

This supports rendering of whole files. If you want to render code blocks in markdown you would need to do something with javascript. See some examples on the Customizing Gitea page.

Installing external binaries​

In order to get file rendering through external binaries, their associated packages must be installed. If you're using a Docker image, your Dockerfile should contain something along this lines:

FROM docker.io/gitea/gitea:1.23.0-rc0
[...]

COPY custom/app.ini /data/gitea/conf/app.ini
[...]

RUN apk --no-cache add asciidoctor freetype freetype-dev gcc g++ libpng libffi-dev pandoc python3-dev py3-pyzmq pipx
# install any other package you need for your external renderers

RUN pipx install jupyter docutils --include-deps --global
# add above any other python package you may need to install

app.ini file configuration​

add one [markup.XXXXX] section per external renderer on your custom app.ini:

[markup.asciidoc]
ENABLED = true
FILE_EXTENSIONS = .adoc,.asciidoc
RENDER_COMMAND = "asciidoctor -s -a showtitle --out-file=- -"
; Input is not a standard input but a file
IS_INPUT_FILE = false

[markup.jupyter]
ENABLED = true
FILE_EXTENSIONS = .ipynb
RENDER_COMMAND = "jupyter nbconvert --stdin --stdout --to html --template basic"
IS_INPUT_FILE = false

[markup.restructuredtext]
ENABLED = true
FILE_EXTENSIONS = .rst
RENDER_COMMAND = "timeout 30s pandoc +RTS -M512M -RTS -f rst"
IS_INPUT_FILE = false

If your external markup relies on additional classes and attributes on the generated HTML elements, you might need to enable custom sanitizer policies. Gitea uses the bluemonday package as our HTML sanitizer. The example below could be used to support server-side KaTeX rendering output from pandoc.

[markup.sanitizer.TeX]
; Pandoc renders TeX segments as <span>s with the "math" class, optionally
; with "inline" or "display" classes depending on context.
; - note this is different from the built-in math support in our markdown parser which uses <code>
ELEMENT = span
ALLOW_ATTR = class
REGEXP = ^\s*((math(\s+|$)|inline(\s+|$)|display(\s+|$)))+

[markup.markdown]
ENABLED         = true
FILE_EXTENSIONS = .md,.markdown
RENDER_COMMAND  = pandoc -f markdown -t html --katex

You must define ELEMENT and ALLOW_ATTR in each section.

To define multiple entries, add a unique alphanumeric suffix (e.g., [markup.sanitizer.1] and [markup.sanitizer.something]).

To apply a sanitisation rules only for a specify external renderer they must use the renderer name, e.g. [markup.sanitizer.asciidoc.rule-1], [markup.sanitizer.<renderer>.rule-1].

Note: If the rule is defined above the renderer ini section or the name does not match a renderer it is applied to every renderer.

Once your configuration changes have been made, restart Gitea to have changes take effect.

Note: Prior to Gitea 1.12 there was a single markup.sanitiser section with keys that were redefined for multiple rules, however, there were significant problems with this method of configuration necessitating configuration through multiple sections.

Example: HTML​

Render HTML files directly:

[markup.html]
ENABLED         = true
FILE_EXTENSIONS = .html,.htm
RENDER_COMMAND  = cat
; Input is not a standard input but a file
IS_INPUT_FILE   = true

[markup.sanitizer.html.1]
ELEMENT = div
ALLOW_ATTR = class

[markup.sanitizer.html.2]
ELEMENT = a
ALLOW_ATTR = class

Example: Office DOCX​

Display Office DOCX files with pandoc:

[markup.docx]
ENABLED = true
FILE_EXTENSIONS = .docx
RENDER_COMMAND = "pandoc --from docx --to html --self-contained --template /path/to/basic.html"

[markup.sanitizer.docx.img]
ALLOW_DATA_URI_IMAGES = true

The template file has the following content:

$body$

Example: Jupyter Notebook​

Display Jupyter Notebook files with nbconvert:

[markup.jupyter]
ENABLED = true
FILE_EXTENSIONS = .ipynb
RENDER_COMMAND = "jupyter-nbconvert --stdin --stdout --to html --template basic"

[markup.sanitizer.jupyter.img]
ALLOW_DATA_URI_IMAGES = true

Customizing CSS​

The external renderer is specified in the .ini in the format [markup.XXXXX] and the HTML supplied by your external renderer will be wrapped in a <div> with classes markup and XXXXX. The markup class provides out of the box styling (as does markdown if XXXXX is markdown). Otherwise you can use these classes to specifically target the contents of your rendered HTML.

And so you could write some CSS:

.markup.XXXXX html {
  font-size: 100%;
  overflow-y: scroll;
  -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;
  -ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;
}

.markup.XXXXX body {
  color: #444;
  font-family: Georgia, Palatino, 'Palatino Linotype', Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;
  font-size: 12px;
  line-height: 1.7;
  padding: 1em;
  margin: auto;
  max-width: 42em;
  background: #fefefe;
}

.markup.XXXXX p {
  color: orangered;
}

Add your stylesheet to your custom directory e.g custom/public/assets/css/my-style-XXXXX.css and import it using a custom header file custom/templates/custom/header.tmpl:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="{{AppSubUrl}}/assets/css/my-style-XXXXX.css" />