taskgraph_ts/docs/architecture/frontmatter.md

status, last_updated

status	last_updated
draft	2026-04-26

Frontmatter Parsing

Parsing and serialization of task markdown files with YAML frontmatter. Included in this package, not a separate module.

Overview

The library provides frontmatter parsing so that file-based consumers (e.g., the future OpenCode plugin) can read task markdown files directly without depending on an external parser. This supports the same YAML frontmatter format as the Rust CLI.

Public Functions

function parseFrontmatter(markdown: string): TaskInput
function parseTaskFile(filePath: string): Promise<TaskInput>
function parseTaskDirectory(dirPath: string): Promise<TaskInput[]>
function serializeFrontmatter(task: TaskInput, body?: string): string

parseFrontmatter and parseTaskFile also run TypeBox validation on the parsed data before returning — invalid frontmatter throws InvalidInputError with field-level details.

parseTaskDirectory Semantics

• Recursive — scans subdirectories recursively
• File extension — .md only
• No frontmatter — files without valid ----delimited frontmatter are silently skipped
• I/O errors — throws the underlying Node.js error (ENOENT, EACCES, etc.)

This is a convenience wrapper for the common case. Consumers that need different discovery semantics (non-recursive, different extensions, custom filtering) should implement their own file discovery and call parseTaskFile per file.

No gray-matter — Self-contained Splitter + yaml

The library writes its own --- delimited frontmatter splitter and uses yaml (by eemeli) as the sole YAML parser. gray-matter is not a dependency.

This is a deliberate supply-chain security decision:

• gray-matter depends on js-yaml@3.x — an old version with known code injection vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-64718 — prototype pollution via YAML merge key <<). Even with gray-matter's custom engine API, js-yaml is still installed in node_modules as a transitive dependency. The attack surface is the install, not the import.
• gray-matter's full tree is 11 packages (js-yaml, argparse, kind-of, section-matter, extend-shallow, is-extendable, strip-bom-string, etc.) — none of which we need.
• Recent npm supply chain attacks (April 2026: 18-package phishing compromise targeting chalk/debug/etc., the Shai-Hulud self-replicating worm hitting 500+ packages, the axios RAT incident) demonstrate that every dependency in the tree is potential attack surface.

What we don't replicate from gray-matter

TOML/Coffee engines, JavaScript eval engine, section-matter (nested sections), in-memory cache. We don't use any of these.

yaml package profile

• Zero dependencies, full YAML 1.2 spec compliance, no known CVEs
• Actively maintained, excellent TypeScript types
• Single-package blast radius — if compromised, tractable to fork (pure JS)

WASM YAML parser — considered and rejected

A Rust YAML crate compiled to WASM was considered as an alternative, but it reintroduces complexity the napi→graphology pivot was designed to remove (Rust toolchain in CI, WASM compile target, cold-start latency, FFI boundary). The marginal security gain over yaml (already zero-dep) doesn't justify the added build complexity.

Splitter Design

The frontmatter splitter is a simple --- delimiter parser (~40 lines). It:

1. Checks for opening --- delimiter (not ----)
2. Finds closing \n--- delimiter
3. Extracts the YAML data string and the markdown content body
4. Returns { data: string, content: string } or null if no valid frontmatter

The actual YAML parsing is delegated to yaml.parse(). The serializer uses yaml.stringify() for the data portion.

Constraints

• No gray-matter, no js-yaml — these are hard exclusions for supply chain security.
• YAML 1.2 only — the yaml package implements YAML 1.2, which is a superset of JSON and avoids the ambiguous type coercion issues of YAML 1.1.
• Frontmatter is a parsing concern, not a graph concern — parsed TaskInput objects are fed to TaskGraph.fromTasks(). The parser doesn't know about graphs; the graph doesn't know about files.

References

• yaml package: https://github.com/eemeli/yaml
• CVE-2025-64718 (js-yaml prototype pollution): tracked in npm audit database