Article Patches

Updated Apr 28, 2026

Sometimes a markdown file doubles as both site content and a file that's read elsewhere — a README.md rendered by GitHub, a shared spec in another project. Adding livemark-only frontmatter to it pollutes the other view.

patches lets you inject frontmatter fields for a specific file from livemark.config.ts instead of editing the file on disk.

Basic usage

import { defineConfig } from "livemark"

export default defineConfig({
  include: ["README.md", "docs/**/*.md"],
  patches: [
    {
      file: "README.md",
      article: {
        title: "Overview",
        icon: "sparkles",
        order: 0,
      },
    },
  ],
})

The file on disk stays clean, but Livemark renders it as if the YAML above were at the top.

Fields

Matching is an exact string compare against the file path Livemark collects. If the path does not match any article, the patch is a silent no-op — handy when you're defensively patching a file that may or may not exist.

Merge semantics

A patch's article fields are merged on top of the file's own frontmatter. Anything you don't specify in the patch keeps its normal value (from the file, or from Livemark's automatic defaults).

So a README with no frontmatter plus:

{ file: "README.md", article: { title: "Overview" } }

renders as an article titled "Overview". All other fields (description, icon, path, etc.) fall back to their defaults.

What you can't patch

The content key is rejected at config load time:

// Throws at startup:
{ file: "README.md", article: { content: "replaced" } }

Patches are for metadata; the content of the file is always the content of the file.

See also

• Frontmatter — all the fields you can set, whether inline or via a patch.
• Configuration — the include glob that decides which files a patch can match.