---
title: "Serve Markdown at page URLs"
description: "Answer agents that ask for Markdown at a page's own URL, by rendering your docs on request."
---

> Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://nimbus-docs.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Serve Markdown at page URLs

Every page already has a Markdown version at `/<slug>/index.md`. With Markdown negotiation, a request to the page's own URL with `Accept: text/markdown` gets that Markdown too, so an agent doesn't need to know the `.md` convention.

## Prerequisites

- `site` set to your production origin in the Nimbus config
- A host with a server adapter: Cloudflare, Netlify, Node or Vercel

## Steps

1. **Add a server adapter**

   Skip this step if the site already has one. For Cloudflare:

   ```sh
   npx @cloudflare/nimbus-docs add adapter-cloudflare
   yarn nimbus-docs add adapter-cloudflare
   pnpm nimbus-docs add adapter-cloudflare
   bunx @cloudflare/nimbus-docs add adapter-cloudflare
   ```

   Other hosts use `adapter-netlify`, `adapter-node` or `adapter-vercel`.
2. **Render the docs on request**

   In `astro.config.ts`, set the docs collection to render on request:

   ```ts title="astro.config.ts" {4}
   const nimbusConfig = defineNimbusConfig({
     site: "https://docs.example.com",
     // …
     rendering: { collections: { docs: "request" } },
   });
   ```
3. **Build and deploy**

   Deploy the server and the generated Markdown files together. Off Cloudflare, the server reads the Markdown from `site`, so the files must be reachable there.

## Verify

Request a page with Markdown first in the `Accept` header:

```sh
curl -I -H 'Accept: text/markdown' https://docs.example.com/guide/
```

```text
HTTP/2 200
content-type: text/markdown; charset=utf-8
vary: Accept
```

If `content-type` is `text/html`, the page is still prerendered: check that its collection is set to `"request"`. A browser's `Accept: */*` always gets HTML.

## Static sites

A prerendered page is served before any server code runs, so it can't negotiate. On Cloudflare, turn on [Markdown for Agents](https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/reference/markdown-for-agents/) for the zone instead: Cloudflare converts the HTML when an agent asks for Markdown.

## API references

Generated API references render on request only with the Cloudflare adapter. On other adapters, keep API collections set to `"build"` while the docs use `"request"`.

## Next steps

- [Markdown and llms.txt](/ai/publish-markdown): the `.md` versions this serves.
- [Override generated Markdown](/ai/override-markdown): change what a page's Markdown contains.

Source: https://nimbus-docs.com/ai/markdown-negotiation/index.mdx