mdbook-last-changed

A preprocessor for mdbook to add a page's last change date and a link to the commit on every page.

It adds a "Last change" footer, including a date and a link to the corresponding commit. It uses the configured git-repository-url as the base.

Requirements

• The git command line tool.
• A configured git repository url in your book.toml configuration. See Configuration.
• Access to the git repository checkout while building your book.

Installation

If you want to use only this preprocessor, install the tool:

cargo install mdbook-last-changed

Add it as a preprocessor to your book.toml:

[preprocessor.last-changed]
command = "mdbook-last-changed"
renderer = ["html"]

Configuration

mdbook-last-changed is configured using additional options under [output.html]:

[output.html]
# Required: Your repository URL used in the link.
git-repository-url = "https://github.com/$user/$project"

• If git-repository-url is not configured the footer will not contain the commit and a link to it and instead only show the last changed date.
• The commit URL is constructed as <git-repository-url>/commit/<commit-id> where <git-repository-url> is the configured URL and <commit-id> is the commit ID fetched from the local repository.
• If the commit URL pattern is different you can set output.html.git-commit-url to any URL. The commit ID will be appended to that URL.
• If you want to disable adding the link set output.html.git-commit-url = false.

Without git-repository-url configured:

<footer id="last-change">Last change: <time datetime="2023-07-09">2023-07-09</time></footer>

With git-repository-url configured:

<footer id="last-change">Last change: <time datetime="2023-07-09">2023-07-09</time>, commit: <a href="https://github.com/$user/$project/commit/$commit">0000000</a></footer>

To style the footer add a custom CSS file for your HTML output:

[output.html]
additional-css = ["last-changed.css"]

And in last-changed.css style the <footer> element or directly the CSS element id last-changed:

footer {
  font-size: 0.8em;
  text-align: center;
  border-top: 1px solid black;
  padding: 5px 0;
}

This code block shrinks the text size, center-aligns it under the rest of the content and adds a small horizontal bar above the text to separate it from the page content.

Finally, build your book as normal:

mdbook path/to/book

License

MPL. See LICENSE.
Copyright (c) 2022-2025 Jan-Erik Rediger janerik@fnordig.de