Github-flavored Markdown descriptions on PyPI

Last month Dustin Ingram happily proclaimed that PyPI supports Markdown Descriptions. This took a lot of work - go check out his wonderful blog post on everything it took to get there.

However, we weren't quite done. While PyPI supported CommonMark, it did not support one of the most widely used variants of Markdown, Github-Flavored Markdown. This meant that users who were using the same README.md for both GitHub and PyPI wouldn't see any of the fancy GitHub-Flavored features on PyPI.

Well, we've fixed that. As of April 2018 PyPI now supports (and defaults to) GitHub-Flavored Markdown.

See it in action

Dustin's original sample project and repo still works, of course, but I went ahead and forked it and added some GitHub-Flavored Markdown examples. You can see this project here and the source here.

What's so beautiful about all of this is you can continue to follow Dustin's instructions on his blog and you get GitHub-Flavored Markdown features automatically. Even projects that previously had broken descriptions because of missing features should see their descriptions fixed. :)

A big round of thanks

None of this would have happened if it weren't for Sumana Harihareswara, Dustin Ingram, and Cosimo Lupo (who helped me crack the Windows wheel building puzzle for cmarkgfm). And of course, this is just building on the work of all the wonderful people who made Markdown descriptions possible in the first place.