Automating the creation of posts in Jekyll

11 Jun 2014

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I like to automate things that are a bit tedious. So, I’ve automated a slightly tedious thing and probably put more time into than will pay off. But perhaps it might help someone else.

To make a post, you put a new file in the _posts/ directory. This file must be named strictly in the form of "yyyy-mm-dd-post-title.md". Once the file is created, a header is required of the following form:

---
layout: post
title: Automating the Creation of Posts in Jekyll
---

This is all stuff that I want created for me – the computer knows the date, right? Why do I have to type that in? And once I declare the title of the post once, why should I type that again?

Obviously I’m just lazy. So, I wrote the ugliest Ruby code you’ve ever seen to automate the post-file creation.

#!/usr/bin/ruby

# introduce ourselves
def greet
  puts "** rywhite's Postmaker - a Jekyll blog post Generator **"
end


# get post title from user
def getPostTitle
  print "Post title: "
  title = gets
  return title
end

# construct file name
def buildFileName(title)
  fileTitle = title.downcase # convert all letters to lower case
  fileTitle = fileTitle.strip # remove all leading or trailing whitespace
  fileTitle = fileTitle.gsub(' ', '-') # convert spaces to dashes
  fileTitle = fileTitle.gsub(/[^\w-]/, '') # removes all non-alpha, non-dash characters, similar 
                                           # to \W, but includes the '-', so we spell it out here
  today = Time.new
  fileName = today.strftime("%Y-%m-%d") + "-" + fileTitle + ".md"
  puts "Post file: " + fileName
  return fileName
end

def toWriteFile(fileName)
  toWrite = true
  if File.file?("_posts/" + fileName)
    puts "This post file already exists. Do you want to overwrite it?"
    print "y/n: "
    input = gets
    toWrite = input.downcase == "y" ? true : false
  end
  
  return toWrite
end

# main script logic
title = getPostTitle
fileName = buildFileName(title)
toWrite = toWriteFile(fileName)

# construct file content
if toWrite
  fileContent = "---\nlayout: post\ntitle: " + title.strip + "\n---\n"
  puts fileContent

  # print post outline to new file. if file already exists, we've already 
  # gotten permission to overwrite it
  file = File.new("_posts/" + fileName, "w+")
  if file
    file.syswrite(fileContent)
  else
    puts "Unable to open file."
  end
end


puts "Done."

I placed the script in the _posts/ directory, and added the file to my .gitignore so that Git wouldn’t try to add it to the server.

What does it look like in action?

Postmaker in action

I’ve never written anything in Ruby before, so this was a fun chance to learn the basics of the language.