Collections

Collections support is unstable and may change

This is an experimental feature and that the API may likely change until the feature stabilizes.

Not everything is a post or a page. Maybe you want to document the various methods in your open source project, members of a team, or talks at a conference. Collections allow you to define a new type of document that behave like Pages or Posts do normally, but also have their own unique properties and namespace.

Using Collections

Step 1: Tell Jekyll to read in your collection

Add the following to your site’s _config.yml file, replacing my_collection with the name of your collection:

collections:
- my_collection

You can optionally specify metadata for your collection in the configuration:

collections:
  my_collection:
    foo: bar

Step 2: Add your content

Create a corresponding folder (e.g. <source>/_my_collection) and add documents. YAML Front Matter is read in as data if it exists, if not, then everything is just stuck in the Document’s content attribute.

Note: the folder must be named identical to the collection you defined in you config.yml file, with the addition of the preceding _ character.

Step 3: Optionally render your collection’s documents into independent files

If you’d like Jekyll to create a public-facing, rendered version of each document in your collection, set the output key to true in your collection metadata in your _config.yml:

collections:
  my_collection:
    output: true

This will produce a file for each document in the collection. For example, if you have _my_collection/some_subdir/some_doc.md, it will be rendered using Liquid and the Markdown converter of your choice and written out to <dest>/my_collection/some_subdir/some_doc.html.

As for posts with Permalinks, document URL can be customized by setting a permalink metadata to the collection:

collections:
  my_collection:
    output: true
    permalink: /awesome/:path/

For example, if you have _my_collection/some_subdir/some_doc.md, it will be written out to <dest>/awesome/some_subdir/some_doc/index.html.

Variable	Description
collection	Label of the containing collection
path	Path to the document relative to the collection's directory
output_ext	Extension of the output file

Liquid Attributes

Collections

Each collection is accessible via the site Liquid variable. For example, if you want to access the albums collection found in _albums, you’d use site.albums. Each collection is itself an array of documents (e.g. site.albums is an array of documents, much like site.pages and site.posts). See below for how to access attributes of those documents.

The collections are also available under site.collections, with the metadata you specified in your _config.yml (if present) and the following information:

Variable	Description
label	The name of your collection, e.g. my_collection.
docs	An array of documents.
relative_directory	The path to the collections's source directory, relative to the site source.
directory	The full path to the collections's source directory.
output	Whether the collection's documents will be output as individual files.

Documents

In addition to any YAML Front Matter provided in the document’s corresponding file, each document has the following attributes:

Variable	Description
content	The (unrendered) content of the document. If no YAML Front Matter is provided, this is the entirety of the file contents. If YAML Front Matter is used, then this is all the contents of the file after the terminating `---` of the front matter.
output	The rendered output of the document, based on the content.
path	The full path to the document's source file.
relative_path	The path to the document's source file relative to the site source.
url	The URL of the rendered collection. The file is only written to the destination when the name of the collection to which it belongs is included in the render key in the site's configuration file.
collection	The name of the document's collection.

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