Streamdown Lite

A lightweight drop-in replacement for react-markdown, designed for AI-powered streaming with code highlighting.

Overview

Formatting Markdown is easy, but when you tokenize and stream it, new challenges arise. Streamdown is built specifically to handle the unique requirements of streaming Markdown content from AI models, providing seamless formatting even with incomplete or unterminated Markdown blocks.

Streamdown powers the AI Elements Response component but can be installed as a standalone package for your own streaming needs.

Features

• 🚀 Drop-in replacement for react-markdown
• 🔄 Streaming-optimized - Handles incomplete Markdown gracefully
• 🎨 Unterminated block parsing - Styles incomplete bold, italic, code, links, and headings
• 📊 GitHub Flavored Markdown - Tables, task lists, and strikethrough support
• 🎯 Code syntax highlighting - Beautiful code blocks with Speed Highlight
• 🛡️ Security-first - Built on harden-react-markdown for safe rendering
• ⚡ Performance optimized - Memoized rendering for efficient updates

Installation

npm i @phaserjs/streamdown-lite

Then, update your Tailwind globals.css to include the following.

@source "../node_modules/@phaserjs/streamdown-lite/dist/index.js";

Make sure the path matches the location of the node_modules folder in your project. This will ensure that the Streamdown styles are applied to your project.

Usage

Basic Example

import { Streamdown } from '@phaserjs/streamdown-lite';

export default function Page() {
  const markdown = "# Hello World\n\nThis is **streaming** markdown!";

  return <Streamdown>{markdown}</Streamdown>;
}

With AI SDK

'use client';

import { useChat } from '@ai-sdk/react';
import { useState } from 'react';
import { Streamdown } from '@phaserjs/streamdown-lite';

export default function Page() {
  const { messages, sendMessage, status } = useChat();
  const [input, setInput] = useState('');

  return (
    <>
      {messages.map(message => (
        <div key={message.id}>
          {message.parts.filter(part => part.type === 'text').map((part, index) => (
            <Streamdown key={index}>{part.text}</Streamdown>
          ))}
        </div>
      ))}

      <form
        onSubmit={e => {
          e.preventDefault();
          if (input.trim()) {
            sendMessage({ text: input });
            setInput('');
          }
        }}
      >
        <input
          value={input}
          onChange={e => setInput(e.target.value)}
          disabled={status !== 'ready'}
          placeholder="Say something..."
        />
        <button type="submit" disabled={status !== 'ready'}>
          Submit
        </button>
      </form>
    </>
  );
}

Props

Streamdown accepts all the same props as react-markdown, plus additional streaming-specific options:

Prop	Type	Default	Description
children	string	-	The Markdown content to render
parseIncompleteMarkdown	boolean	true	Parse and style unterminated Markdown blocks
className	string	-	CSS class for the container
components	object	-	Custom component overrides
remarkPlugins	array	[remarkGfm]	Remark plugins to use
rehypePlugins	array	[rehypeKatex]	Rehype plugins to use
allowedImagePrefixes	array	['*']	Allowed image URL prefixes
allowedLinkPrefixes	array	['*']	Allowed link URL prefixes
defaultOrigin	string	-	Default origin to use for relative URLs in links and images

Note: Streamdown-lite also accepts all props from react-markdown through inheritance.

Architecture

Streamdown-lite is built as a monorepo with:

• packages/streamdown-lite - The core React component library
• apps/website - Documentation and demo site

Development

# Install dependencies
pnpm install

# Build the streamdown-lite package
pnpm --filter streamdown-lite build

# Run development server
pnpm dev

# Run tests
pnpm test

# Build packages
pnpm build

Requirements

• Node.js >= 18
• React >= 19.1.1

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.