jekyll-dry

Jekyll plugin that helps you to implement the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle while writing documentation using Jekyll. The plugin allows you to reuse any fragments of markdown multiple times across a single Jekyll website. The fragments can include Liquid syntax and tags.

Table of contents

• User Guide:
  • Usage
  • Installation
  • Incompatibility with GitHub Pages
• Implementation:
  • Plugin's architecture
  • Detailed Design

Usage

Fragment's beginning tag: {% frag ... %}

frag tag marks the beginning of a reusable fragment and assigns a unique id to it. Everything between frag and endfrag tags with unique id is considered a unique reusable fragment that can be included to any page.

Example of usage:

It was decided that the amount of dependencies of the executable will
be kept at minimum. For that reason {% frag dependencies %}the only
dependency is Python's `argparse` library{% endfrag dependencies %}.

As a result of the above markup the dependencies file will be generated and will contain following text:

the only dependency is Python's `argparse` library

The generated file is now available for inclusion at any page, including the page where it was initially declared. During generation process frag tag is replaced in page with an empty string.

Fragment's end tag: {% endfrag ... %}

endfrag tag only marks the end of the fragment declared by frag tag and is only used by it. After Jekyll processes the page endfrag disappears.

If no matching endfrag is found for a given frag, then that frag will not be counted as a valid fragment and will not produce an include file.

Example of usage: see above.

During generation process endfrag tag is replaced in page with an empty string.

Fragment embedding tag: {% > ... %}

> inclusion tag that searches for an include file with a given unique id generated by frag tag. Works in exactly same way as traditional include tag, but does not use parameters.

Example of usage:

Testing will require a test suite that covers a set of test cases
derived from initial use cases. However, since {% > dependencies %},
the testing will be entirely implemented using just the `py.test`
library.

Which will produce the following result:

Testing will require a test suite that covers a set of test cases derived from initial use cases. However, since the only dependency is Python's argparse library, the testing will be entirely implemented using just the py.test library.

Installation

Drop the jekyll-dry.rb file into the _plugins directory of the website as described in the first option of enabling a plugin in Jekyll documentation:

In your site source root, make a _plugins directory. Place your plugins
here. Any file ending in *.rb inside this directory will be loaded
before Jekyll generates your site.

Incompatibility with GitHub Pages

Since this is a custom plugin which is not included in the code set of GitHub pages plugins it will not work with GitHub's automatic website generation.

You will have to generate the website locally and then push the contents of the _site folder to GitHub in order to publish your website.