Asset Handling

All Markdown files are compiled into Vue components and processed by Vite. You can, and should, reference any assets using relative URLs:

You can reference static assets in your markdown files, your *.vue components in the theme, styles and plain .css files either using absolute public paths (based on project root) or relative paths (based on your file system). The latter is similar to the behavior you are used to if you have used Vite, Vue CLI, or webpack's file-loader.

Common image, media, and font filetypes are detected and included as assets automatically.

Linked files are not treated as assets

PDFs or other documents referenced by links within markdown files are not automatically treated as assets. To make linked files accessible, you must manually place them within the public directory of your project.

All referenced assets, including those using absolute paths, will be copied to the output directory with a hashed file name in the production build. Never-referenced assets will not be copied. Image assets smaller than 4kb will be base64 inlined - this can be configured via the vite config option.

All static path references, including absolute paths, should be based on your working directory structure.

Sometimes you may need to provide static assets that are not directly referenced in any of your Markdown or theme components, or you may want to serve certain files with the original filename. Examples of such files include robots.txt, favicons, and PWA icons.

You can place these files in the public directory under the source directory. For example, if your project root is ./docs and using default source directory location, then your public directory will be ./docs/public.

Assets placed in public will be copied to the root of the output directory as-is.

Note that you should reference files placed in public using root absolute path - for example, public/icon.png should always be referenced in source code as /icon.png.

If your site is deployed to a non-root URL, you will need to set the base option in .vitepress/config.js. For example, if you plan to deploy your site to https://foo.github.io/bar/, then base should be set to '/bar/' (it should always start and end with a slash).

All your static asset paths are automatically processed to adjust for different base config values. For example, if you have an absolute reference to an asset under public in your markdown:

You do not need to update it when you change the base config value in this case.

However, if you are authoring a theme component that links to assets dynamically, e.g. an image whose src is based on a theme config value:

In this case it is recommended to wrap the path with the withBase helper provided by VitePress: