GitHub Pages drops support for RDiscount, Redcarpet, and RedCloth (Textile) markup engines

Back in February, we announced, that GitHub Pages would be dropping support for the RDiscount, Redcarpet, and RedCloth (Textile) markup engines, and today we’re making it official.

For the vast majority of users, making the switch should be easy, as kramdown supports all of RDiscount and Redcarpet’s most popular features. If you’re making the transition from Textile, follow these instructions to upgrade your site to Markdown.

In standardizing on a single Markdown engine, we’re able to simplify and improve the publishing experience, by removing much of the confusion and complexity associated with the differences between various markdown interpretations, bringing things more closely in line with what you’d expect from Markdown rendering on GitHub.com. See last month’s blog post on the subject, for more context behind our decision.

If you’re still using RDiscount, Redcarpet, or RedCloth, next time you push to your GitHub Pages site, you will receive an email from us with instructions on how to upgrade. We highly recommend you test building your site locally with kramdown prior to pushing. If you’re a GitHub Enterprise user, this change will affect GitHub Enterprise versions 2.7 and later.

In most cases, upgrading to kramdown should be a matter of updating your site’s configuration. If in the off chance you do run into any trouble, please get in touch with us, or if you have questions about what this change means for your GitHub Enterprise appliance, please contact GitHub Enterprise support. We’re here to help.

Written by

Ben Balter

@benbalter

Ben Balter is Chief of Staff for Security at GitHub, the world’s largest software development platform. Previously, as a Staff Technical Program manager for Enterprise and Compliance, Ben managed GitHub’s on-premises and SaaS enterprise offerings, and as the Senior Product Manager overseeing the platform’s Trust and Safety efforts, Ben shipped more than 500 features in support of community management, privacy, compliance, content moderation, product security, platform health, and open source workflows to ensure the GitHub community and platform remained safe, secure, and welcoming for all software developers. Before joining GitHub’s Product team, Ben served as GitHub’s Government Evangelist, leading the efforts to encourage more than 2,000 government organizations across 75 countries to adopt open source philosophies for code, data, and policy development.