Jekyll: Include record in site.records but do not render html page

Question

I have a Jekyll setup that looks like this:

_config.yml
_records
  a.html
  b.html
  c.html
...

I want to create a home page that links to each record. However, I want to render a.html and b.html to /records/, but I don't want to render c.html to /records/, as that HTML will be provided to my server from a different process altogether.

I tried setting the following in _config.yml:

exclude:
  _records/c.html

But this also removes c.html from site.records, which is not what I want. The best solution I have right now is to prevent my deploy script from deploying _site/records/c.html, but I'd much rather prevent _site/records/c.html from being generated in the first place.

Is it possible to include c.html in site.records to create the links on the home page but not render /records/c.html? Any help others can offer with this question would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Here's how I did this. Inside _records/c.html, set in the front matter:

permalink: '_'
route: /records/c.html

That will make it so that we render the page's html content to _site/_.html, a route that won't ever get visited.

Then in index.html to create the link to the route attribute of this page, use:

{% for record in site.records %}
  {% if record.route %}
    {% assign url = record.route %}
  {% else %}
    {% assign url = record.url %}
  {% endif %}
  <a href='{{ url }}'>{{ record.title }}</a>
{% endfor %}