06 Sep 2010
Jekyll postfiles plugin
Through the years, I’ve used a lot of blogging engines. Nowadays, I use Jekyll to generate a static version of my blog. Jekyll has had one annoying shortcoming for me, though – it doesn’t support including files in a blog post. This has bitten me more than once, especially as I move between blogging engines (or just try to clean up random files on my web server).
About a year ago, I decided to try to fix that. So, I forked Jekyll and patched it to allow files associated with posts in a _postfiles directory. That worked for a while (although I had to install my fork onto my server, which was a little bit annoying). This week, I realized that my RSS feed had broken images because I was using relative paths to reference postfiles. To solve that, I decided to write a {% postfile foo %} liquid tag that expanded file references out to absolute paths.
While working on the liquid tag, I discovered that Jekyll 0.7 supports plugins, and that I could stop forking Jekyll and just write a plugin instead. So I did. Presenting jekyll-postfiles, a plugin for Jekyll that (optionally) adds files to each post. Just create a folder named _postfiles, next to the folder named _posts. When you have a file that you want to include in a post, create a folder with the same name as the post, and put the file in there, with a directory structure like this:
_posts/
2010-09-06-jekyll-postfiles-plugin.md
_postfiles/
2010-09-06-jekyll-postfiles-plugin/
file.zip
Reference the file inside the post using the liquid tag, like {% postfile file.zip %}, and you’re all set.
tl;dr
I wrote a Jekyll plugin to let you include files with your posts! You can get it on github at indirect/jekyll-postfiles