Rakefile for Jekyll site management

Previously I’ve used a bunch of scripts for managing post creation and site compilation tasks, but recently I decided to move over to Rake. The whole Rakefile as-it-stands is in the repo, naturally, but here’s a couple of bits I’m finding useful.

I have a default task set up that runs compass, jekyll, and git commits and git pushes the result. The compass and jekyll bits are simple sh steps, but the rest is a bit more involved. Let’s start with post creation though, in the spirit of the real workflow.

namespace "post" do
  desc "Given a title as an argument, create a new post file"
  task :new, [:title] do |t, args|
    now = DateTime::now().to_date()
    filename = "#{now.strftime}-#{args.title.gsub(/\s/, '_').downcase}.markdown"
    path = File.join("_posts", filename)
    if File.exist? path; raise RuntimeError.new("Won't clobber #{path}"); end
    File.open(path, 'w') do |file|
      file.write <<-EOS
---
layout: post
title: #{args.title}
---
Content goes here
EOS
    end
    puts "Now open #{path} in an editor."
  end
end

The above listing is the new post creation task, and the entirety of the post namespace currently, as it happens. It takes the post title as an argument, and uses that and the current date to generate a filename. At the moment it just replaces whitespace with underscores, but it might be good to do more escaping to ensure a good filename. Then the task writes a post template into the file and prints the filename so it’s easy to launch an editor for it.

To ensure good clean commits of the site I clean the _site directory before compilation, i.e. delete all files except for any dotfiles, so as not to destroy the .git dir in there. I use a helper method to get a list of all the files:

def site_files
  FileList['_site/**/*'].find_all {|f| File.file? f}
end

This file list is then used in the clean and commit tasks like this:

desc "Clean generated site files"
task :clean do
  FileUtils.rm site_files
end

desc "Commit compiled site to Git"
task :commit do
  g = Git.open('_site')
  g.add site_files.map {|f| f.gsub(/^_site\//, '')}
  g.commit "Regenerated"
end

desc "Push committed site to GitHub"
task :push do
  g = Git.open('_site')
  g.push
end

The clean task is simple because one can use the filelist directly, but when committing, the _site dir bit has to be dropped from the filenames with a simple map + gsub combo. I’m using Scott Chacon’s ruby-git gem to perform git operations on the repo.

That’s pretty much it for the moment. I might expand the post management features a bit at some point though, but since most of that is no simpler via Rake than through shell commands and an editor, it remains to be seen what those new features might be.