A Jekyll Site Configuration Settings Page

update 28 June 2018: not long after I threw this little bit together, a proper Jekyll information plugin appeared in the form of jekyll-info , courtesy of Steven Westmoreland. It is more comprehensive and has a much nicer presentation, and I highly recommend it. That said, my little creation, being purely a drop-in Liquid + markdown page means you don’t need to worry about any interference if your site happens to be using the github-pages gem, for whatever that’s worth (and thus it also runs on GitHub as well.

I recently wanted to have a way to quickly check how my Jekyll server was ultimately configured after startup, taking into account the fact that some Jekyll-related plugins/gems (specifically, the github-pages gem) have effects on the configuration that are not necessarily immediately clear (i.e., the fact that github-pages sets the plugin directory to a random value). Moreover, I wanted a clean view into the configuration settings for troubleshooting their use elsewhere on my site.

The following code generates a simple page (I wanted to limit it to a bit of markdown and a handful of Liquid) that iterates through the site.* variables in alphabetical order. In addition, it is set, via two page variables, to exclude (config_excludes) certain configuration values because they tend to be large and not particularly helpful, and to clip those that it doesn’t exclude, but that exceed the specified truncation length (config_truncate). It also flags those values that are null with code styling, and marks truncated entries in bold.

It is worth noting that to be able to get a read on the size of a given configuration value, I had to wrangle the variables a bit, partly because Liquid’s size function reports values differently for strings (characters) vs. arrays (elements), but also because, as far as I can tell, there’s no Liquid function to determine a variable’s type. The nice thing is that Liquid’s capture function can be used to capture the contents of a variable into a string, regardless of type; in the case of an array, it stringifies it, just as it would if it were placed visibly on the page. As a result, size can be measured consistently across all variables.

jekyll-config.md