Created
April 13, 2023 04:45
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An Eleventy filter that extracts the meta description from within the <head> element of a web page
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| // getDescription - given a url, this Eleventy filter extracts the meta | |
| // description from within the <head> element of a web page using the cheerio | |
| // library. | |
| // | |
| // The full html content of the page is fetched using the eleventy-fetch plugin. | |
| // If you have a lot of links from which you want to extract descriptions, the | |
| // initial build time will be slow. However, the plugin will cache the content | |
| // for a duration of your choosing (in this example, it's set to 1 day). | |
| // | |
| // The description is extracted from the <meta> element with the name attribute | |
| // of "description". | |
| // | |
| // If no description is found, the filter returns an empty string. In the event | |
| // of an error, the filter logs an error to the console and returns the string | |
| // "(no description available)" | |
| // | |
| // Be sure to create a .cache folder in your project root and add .cache to your | |
| // .gitignore file. See https://www.11ty.dev/docs/plugins/fetch/#installation | |
| // | |
| const EleventyFetch = require("@11ty/eleventy-fetch"); | |
| const cheerio = require("cheerio"); | |
| eleventyConfig.addFilter( | |
| "getDescription", | |
| async function getDescription(link) { | |
| try { | |
| let htmlcontent = await EleventyFetch(link, { | |
| duration: "1d", | |
| type: "buffer", | |
| }); | |
| const $ = cheerio.load(htmlcontent); | |
| // console.log( | |
| // "description: " + $("meta[name=description]").attr("content") | |
| // ); | |
| return $("meta[name=description]").attr("content"); | |
| } catch (e) { | |
| console.log( | |
| "Error fetching description for " + link + ": " + e.message | |
| ); | |
| return "(no description available)"; | |
| } | |
| } | |
| ); |
For my use case, specifically for the 11tybundle.dev site, I have changed the cache duration to '*', meaning that eleventy will never fetch new data (after the first success). There's no need for me to be re-fetching complete blog posts to extract a description...once is quite enough.
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Thanks, Zach. I can't quite understand how to make that work, but I'm still in the early stages of javascript and npm package knowledge journey. Once I understand "cascading asset bucketing" I think I'll be read to conquer linkedom ;-)