jekyll-multisite

Jekyll doesn't support multiple sites by default. If you want to have multiple sites with shared source code with Jekyll, you'll need to use the jekyll-unsanitize gem plus a ton of ugly symbolic links in your source tree. The following plugin adds support for a shared base that can be used in multiple Jekyll projects.

• jekyll

To install the current release, run the following:

gem install jekyll-multisite

To install from source:

git clone https://github.com/csware/jekyll-multisite
cd jekyll-multisite
gem build jekyll-multisite.gemspec
gem install jekyll-multisite-<version>.gem

Each individual site needs to have it's own configuration file with it's own source and destination. Let's use _example_com.yml to demonstrate:

...
title: Example dot Com
url: http://example.com
destination: _site/example.com
source: '_example.com'
exclude: ['some-file.md']
...

Now, lets' create a second site as well, in a file called _example_net.yml

...
title: Example dot Net
url: http://example.net
destination: _site/example.net
source: '_example.net'
exclude: ['some-other-file.md']
...

Finally, we need a base _config.yml that declares all the settings that are shared:

email: nobody@example.com
baseurl: ""
paginate: 10
gems:
 - jekyll-multisite
 - jekyll-paginate

markdown: kramdown

layouts_dir: _layouts
includes_dir: _includes
plugins_dir:
 - _plugins
shared_dir: _shared

include: ['.htaccess']

sass:
  sass_dir: _sass
  style: compressed

Please note the _plugins directory must be a list and not a string See Issue #4261

Due to the way things are done internally in Jekyll and the limitation of my plugin, the shared source directory must be one directory down from the source path. Your directory structure should look like the following:

.
├── _config.yml
├── _example.com
│   ├── about.md
│   ├── css
│   ├── _data
│   ├── _drafts
│   ├── favicon.ico
│   ├── files
│   ├── images
│   ├── _posts
│   └── videos.html
├── _example_com.yml
├── _example.net
│   ├── about.md
│   ├── css
│   ├── _data
│   ├── _drafts
│   ├── favicon.ico
│   ├── files
│   ├── images
│   ├── _posts
│   └── videos.html
├── _example_net.yml
├── _shared
│   ├── 404.html
│   ├── archives.md
│   ├── contact.md
│   ├── css
│   ├── feed.xml
│   ├── fonts
│   ├── index.html
│   └── js
├── _includes
├── _layouts
└── _plugins

When you build you sites, built them like so:

jekyll build --config _config.yml,_example_net.yml
jekyll build --config _config.yml,_example_com.yml

Things to note:

• _plugins must be a list. Since the plugin_manager.rb is loaded first to load this plugin, there is no way to monkey-patch in a fix for this.
• Watching and dynamic updating of changed to the _shared directory doesn't currently work
• _shared must be one directory below (../) the source for each website.
• If you have something in both the site source and the shared source, the shared will overwrite what is in the site source
• I had to monkey patch the pagination plugin to work with this setup. This gem auto-detects if you have jekyll-pagination and applies the patch if needed. You may have to adjust other plugins for multi-site support
• The shared output is actually generated in _site and moved after generation is complete
• This entire plugin is very hacky and does some interesting stuff under the hood to get multi-site working.