The mdx-components file

Before we experiment with plugins in one of the next parts, I wanted to first come back to the mdx-components.tsx file, which we briefly saw when setting up MDX support (at the very beginning), as the file is required to make MDX work

Using this file you can do some of the things a plugin would do, but without having to install an additional package, for example, mdx-components.tsx is great if we want to quickly and easily replace an HTML Element with a React component

Or we can use it to quickly add a CSS class to HTML elements, for example, add a class to all our <ul> unordered list elements because the markdown syntax does NOT let us add a class to a markdown element, in a similar way that we add a class to an HTML element, the second difficulty with ul lists, is that the <ul> element itself is not even part of the markdown syntax:

* foo
* bar

To solve this, you could add a remark plugin, which would extend the base markdown syntax, but if you want to move your content to another platform someday, then that platform might not understand your custom markdown syntax as the plugin you used to add classes to lists is not installed, which then could create parsing errors on that platform

You could also write a custom react component, but then you would need to manually import and use that react component in every single MDX page. The advantage of using the mdx-components file is that you only need to import a component once. For example, in the next part of this tutorial, we will create a custom link component, which we will only need to import once into the mdx-components file, but it will then transform every link in every page of our project.

In the next chapter we will use the next/mdx mdx-components.tsx file to add a class to all of our lists without using an extra plugin, without importing a component in every page, and without having to introduce any new markdown syntax

Adding a CSS class to lists using mdx-components

First, open the mdx-components.tsx (which is in the root of your project) and add an entry for each headline (replace the commented out example), like so:

import type { MDXComponents } from 'mdx/types'
 
// This file allows you to provide custom React components
// to be used in MDX files. You can import and use any
// React component you want, including components from
// other libraries.
 
// This file is required to use MDX in `app` directory.
export function useMDXComponents(components: MDXComponents): MDXComponents {
    return {
        // Allows customizing built-in components, e.g. to add styling.
        ul: ({ children, ...props }) => (
            <ul className="listContainer" {...props}>
                {children}
            </ul>
        ),
        ...components,
    }
}

Lines 12 to 16: we have created a simple custom component for ul lists, what happens is that first, the markdown parser turns the markdown list into HTML, and then mdx-components will be used to add a CSS class called listContainer to each <ul> element

CSS class example using a MDX playground page

Next, let's create a new playground to experiment with the mdx-components file

Inside the /app/(tutorial_examples) folder, create a mdx-components_playground folder

Then, in the mdx-components_playground folder, create a page.mdx file and paste the following content into it:

<article>
 
* foo
* bar
 
</article>
 

Now ensure the dev server is running (or launch it using the npm run dev command), and then in the browser, navigate to http://localhost:3000/mdx-components_playground, then use your browser developer tools inspect tool and you will see that the <ul> element now has a class attribute containing the value listContainer

Congratulations 🎉 you just learned how to use the mdx-components file, in other parts of this tutorial, we will edit this file again and add several more features to it

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