schoenwaldnils
6/11/2013 - 12:37 PM

Make environment variables available in Jekyll Liquid templates

Make environment variables available in Jekyll Liquid templates

environment_variables.rb
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# Plugin to add environment variables to the `site` object in Liquid templates

module Jekyll

  class EnvironmentVariablesGenerator < Generator

    def generate(site)
      site.config['env'] = ENV['JEKYLL_ENV'] || 'development'
      # Add other environment variables to `site.config` here...
    end

  end

end
environment-variables-jekyll-templates.md
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Environment variables in Jekyll templates

This is one way to pass some data (API tokens, etc.) to your Jekyll templates without putting it in your _config.yml file (which is likely to be committed in your GitHub repository).

Copy the environment_variables.rb plugin to your _plugins folder, and add any environment variable you wish to have available on the site.config object.

In a Liquid template, that information will be available through the site object. For example, _layouts/default.html could contain:

<head>
   <!-- ... -->
  {% if site.env == 'production' %}
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="/build/style.min.css">
  {% else %}
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="/style.css">
  {% endif %}
</head>

Running jekyll build will use style.css by default. If you set export JEKYLL_ENV=production before running jekyll build, it will use style.min.css.