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rubyrakejekyll

Jekyll: simplest possible rakefile to create new post


I just started using jekyll (I am new to ruby) and am trying to create a rakefile to automate the creation of posts.

I want to type something like: rake post title="x" and have it create a post with that title and today's date.

Right now I am looking at the rakefile from jekyll bootstrap but it seems like overkill for what I want.

I cut it down to:

require 'rake'
require 'yaml'

SOURCE = "."
CONFIG = {
  'posts' => File.join(SOURCE, "_posts"),
  'post_ext' => "md",
}

# Usage: rake post title="A Title"
desc "Begin a new post in #{CONFIG['posts']}"
task :post do
  abort("rake aborted: '#{CONFIG['posts']}' directory not found.") unless FileTest.directory?(CONFIG['posts'])
  title = ENV["title"] || "new-post"
  slug = title.downcase.strip.gsub(' ', '-').gsub(/[^\w-]/, '')
  filename = File.join(CONFIG['posts'], "#{Time.now.strftime('%Y-%m-%d')}-#{slug}.#{CONFIG['post_ext']}")
  if File.exist?(filename)
    abort("rake aborted!") if ask("#{filename} already exists. Do you want to overwrite?", ['y', 'n']) == 'n'
  end

  puts "Creating new post: #{filename}"
  open(filename, 'w') do |post|
    post.puts "---"
    post.puts "layout: post"
    post.puts "title: \"#{title.gsub(/-/,' ')}\""
    post.puts "category: "
    post.puts "tags: []"
    post.puts "---"
  end
end # task :post

But maybe there is a cleaner way to go about this.

Question: can this be simplified further or is there a better way to do what I am trying to do?


Solution

  • If you (or anyone) is still interested, a quite minimal rakefile could be:

    require 'time'
    
    desc 'create a new draft post'
    task :post do
        title = ENV['TITLE']
        slug = "#{Date.today}-#{title.downcase.gsub(/[^\w]+/, '-')}"
    
        file = File.join(
            File.dirname(__FILE__),
            '_posts',
            slug + '.markdown'
        )
    
        File.open(file, "w") do |f|
            f << <<-EOS.gsub(/^     /, '')
            ---
            layout: post
            title: #{title}
            published: false
            categories:
            ---
    
            EOS
        end
    
        system ("#{ENV['EDITOR']} #{file}")
    end
    

    Taken from here.