Jekyll REST API

This is a read only JSON API, making it easier to connect third party systems to your content, or do more advanced renderings with javascript on your jekyll site that can't be done with the liquid syntax.

Table of contents

• Ideas of what you can build with this API
• Installation
  • Via git submodule
  • Via bower
• Output examples
  • posts.json
  • settings.json

Ideas of what you can build with this API:

• Search through all your Jekyll posts with javascript, without having to parse the HTML.
• Define settings for your javascript via your _config.yml.
• Create a javascript code that will alert the user on the screen when there is a new post available.
• Apply filters to the post content before rendering, such as wrapping all images in a different code for a lightbox system.

Installation

Via git submodule

Installing

git submodule add 'https://github.com/riichard/jekyll-rest-api'

Usage

http://myjekyllsite.com/jekyll-rest-api/posts.json

This also works like a charm on .github.io URLs.

Via bower

Installing

bower install jekyll-rest-api

Usage

http://myjekyllsite.com/bower_components/jekyll-rest-api/posts.json

Output examples

All output examples can also be found in the output-example folder.

/posts.json

[
        {
            "id"         : "/The unique ID of the post",
            "title"      : "The title of the post",
            "category"   : "demo",
            "tags"       : "demo,test",
            "url"        : "/url-according-to-config-defined-formatting",
            "path"       : "_posts/2015-07-21-demo.md",
            "next"       : "/path-to-next-post-or-empty-string",
            "previous"   : "/path-to-previous-post-or-empty-string",
            "date"       : "2015-07-26 04:00:00 -0400",
            "shortdate"  : "July 26, 2015",
            "content"    : "<p>Escaped content</p>",
            "excerpt"    : "<p>First paragraph of post</p>",
        } 
        ....
]

JSONP - Cross domain access

To access this file cross domain, you can load /posts.js and create a callback function called jekyllPostsCallback. Due to technical limitations of static file servers it's not possible to pass a custom callback function name.

/settings.json

{
    "title": "Richard A. Kraaijenhagen",
    "description": "Full Stack Developer & Data Scientist/Visualizer. Founder Owlin.",
    "default_bg": "avatar_45.jpg",
    "search": "true",
    "share": "true",
    "readtime": "true",
    "wpm": "200",
    "baseurl": "",
    "fin_color": "255,255,255",
    "timezone": "America/New_York",
    "encoding": "utf-8",
    "categories": [
        "owlin"
    ],
    "tags": [
        "owlin",
        "vim"
    ],
}

This will contain all keys defined in _config.yml. Due to a conflict with jekyll, this file couldn't be named config.json but is named settings.json instead.

JSONP - Cross domain access

To access this file cross domain, you can load /settings.js and create a callback function called jekyllSettingsCallback. Due to technical limitations of static file servers it's not possible to pass a custom callback function name.