Use Jekyll Compose To Create New Draft Quickly

Jekyll is awesome, isn’t it? But I noticed one annoyance when creating a new post. Basically, in Jekyll we have to name file with format YYYY-MM-DD-tittle-blah-blah.md when creating a new post. Wouldn’t it be quicker and convenient if jekyll provide a quick command to create new post and generate the file name automatically? I was wondering if the command itself exists because i’m a newcomer, if not then I’ll try to write it by myself. We shouldn’t reinvent the wheel right?

So, quick googling led me to this discussion. It’s very long discussion and was actually started since 2014 (glad it wasn’t only me that feel the annoyance). I have no time to read all the discussion and quickly scrolled to the most bottom part of the discussion. I found that there is some resistance to include the command into jekyll repository directly. Fortunately, a nice guy from github decided to make plugin for it. And here it is , jekyll-compose. A plugin to quick compose draft and publish it.

So basically what we have to do is to include the plugin into our application’s Gemfile like this.

gem 'jekyll-compose', group: [:jekyll_plugins]

And then execute bundle install.

For creating a new draft just execute bundle exec jekyll draft "New draft title".

Then for publishing the draft just execute bundle exec jekyll publish _drafts/new-draft.md. It’ll move the draft file into _post directory and prepend current date into the file name. Cool!! Setting the date can be performed using --date YYYY-MM-DD for command above. You could also generate post and page, and unpublish the post. The detail information of usage and option can be found in the repository.

Enjoy.