Jekyll: Writing a Jekyll::Generator

09 May 2019

There is annoying little documentation about writing a generator for Jekyll, particularly since when searching for examples, there is so much noise in form of hits for "static site generator." Two decent examples are from Ricardo Lopes and Starr Horne of Honeybadger.

Starting at the beginning, you want to be putting my_generator.rb in _plugins/ in the root directory of your Jekyll site directory.

For an absolute "Hello, World" we can do:

class Generator < Jekyll::Generator
  def generate(site)
    puts "Hello, World!"
  end
end

which prints out to the terminal when you bundle exec jekyll serve. Look for it after Generating...

Let's just print out some file types

class Generator < Jekyll::Generator
  def generate(site)
    site.pages.each do |page|
      print "title: ", page.data["title"], "\n"
      print "file: ", page.path, "\n"
    end
  end
end

this shows you the titles of pages, but not posts, with front matter on your site. Also, we show the path/file name, the path is relative to site root.

Using Site Variables, we have a selection of file types we can have a look at:

    site.posts.each do |page|
      print "title: ", page.data["title"], "\n"
      print "file: ", page.path, "\n"
    end

Posts (presumably without collections. I don't have any, so...)

    site.static_files.each do |page|
      print "name: ", page.name, "\n"
      print "file: ", page.path, "\n"
    end

static files are anything without front matter like images, javascript, css, text, so no titles

    site.documents.each do |page|
      print "title: ", page.data["title"], "\n"
      print "file: ", page.path, "\n"
    end

posts + collections

html_pages and html_files don't seem to work in this context...?

Jekyll: Writing a Jekyll::Generator

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