I needed Markdown JSON in four pipelines, so I shipped one endpoint that does it once

The same parser, four times Over the last year I kept running into the same shape of problem: A docs site generator that wanted Markdown chapters turned into navigation JSON. A RAG ingestion script where each Markdown file needed to become a list of text chunks plus its frontmatter metadata. An n8n flow that took Markdown emails and extracted only the tasklists. A static-site backend that accepted user Markdown and needed to validate structure before persisting. Each one is small on its own. But every time I reached for a different library — remark here, gray-matter there, marked once, a hand-rolled regex once too many — and every time one of them broke on the same edge cases: Nested GFM tasklists where the checked state was silently lost YAML frontmatter that included quoted booleans (parsed as strings, not booleans) Tables whose headers contained spaces (regex parsers treated them as one key) Code blocks containing Markdown — re-parsed as Markdown instead of fenced code So I built one endpoint that does it once, properly. What it returns POST /v1/parse takes a Markdown body ( text/markdown ) or a JSON envelope ( application/json ) and returns one stable JSON shape: { "success" : true , "data" : { "title" : "Project Alpha" , "frontmatter" : { "title" : "Project Alpha" , "status" : "shipping" }, "headings" : [ { "level" : 1 , "text" : "Project Alpha" , "id" : "project-alpha" } ], "sections" : [ { "heading" : { ... }, "children" : [ ... ], "content" : [ ... ] } ], "lists" : [ { "ordered" : false , "items" : [ "ship MVP" , "write README" ] } ], "tasklists" : [ { "items" : [ { "text" : "ship MVP" , "checked" : true } ] } ], "tables" : [ { "headers" : [ "Module" , "Status" ], "rows" : [{ "Module" : "API" , "Status" : "Done" }] } ], "codeBlocks" :[ { "lang" : "js" , "value" : "..." } ], "links" : [ { "text" : "..." , "url" : "https://..." } ], "paragraphs" :[ "..." ], "ast" : null } } The sections tree is the part I care most about. It's not just a flat list of headings