Generator plugins broken by new cleanup behavior

[andyfowler]

Any generator that writes files directly to the output directory is broken as of commit c1ed790 -- this includes the sample generator code in the wiki. It's not clear how a generator should specify that the files it creates are 'whitelisted'.

[molte]

I am experiencing this issue too.

Any file that is created by a generator will be marked as obsolete and deleted even though it has just been created.

[philippbosch]

Same here. Good to know I'm not alone with this problem …
Any advice welcome.

[molte]

Creating a Ruby file in the "_plugins" folder with the following contents works for me, though I haven't run it against the test suite:

module Jekyll
  class Site
    def process
      self.reset
      self.read
      self.cleanup
      self.generate
      self.render
      self.write
    end
  end
end

[andyfowler]

@molte -- nice workaround, although I hope this isn't the long-term solution. In my case, I'm compiling LESS.js files, and with this workaround, they're all regenerated each run.

[molte]

Of course you could also entirely remove the self.cleanup line and then setup the generator to only regenerate/recompile if the source file has been modified by including something like this in your generator:

def generate(site)
  if modified? File.join(site.source, "foo"), File.join(site.dest, "bar")
    # Execute the generation ...
  end
end

def file_timestamp(path)
  File.exist?(path) ? File.mtime(path).to_i : 0
end

def modified?(input_path, output_path)
  file_timestamp(input_path) != file_timestamp(output_path)
end

[josegonzalez]

You can actually fix this by doing site.static_files << index after performing index.write(site.dest), where index is the GeneratorObject. I tried using site.pages instead of site.static_files, but I ended up getting Liquid Exceptions. Of course, I would still integrate @molte's suggestion.

I've also updated the sample code in the wiki.

[sparkertime]

I think that updated example in the wiki isn't right - "index" isn't anything at that point in the code.

[josegonzalez]

Sorry about that, it should be "f". I just took index from a plugin I wrote for my installation.

If it's still broken, I can provide a complete working example, it just wont be the specific one the wiki uses.

[sparkertime]

The working example may be good - even with that it looks like it's busted on the latest version of jekyll - it tries to call #destination on whatever is passed into static_files

[josegonzalez]

I've updated the example, although it might not be the simplest. It generates category index files, which people might find useful.

[adunkman]

I ended up using a custom implementation of StaticFile that didn't actually do anything during the write phase, but since it existed in site.static_files, the output wouldn't get cleaned away. See https://gist.github.com/920651

[parkr]

Site#cleanup depends upon the site having created the list of files. The better option would be for Generators and the like to add the files they generate to the Site's file manifest and to remove those files from the chopping block.

Why doesn't this affect the pagination plugin?

[pathawks]

I have absolutely no idea why my file is created during generation, and then deleted during cleanup.

File.open(File.join( site.dest, 'feeds/posts', 'full.xml' ), 'w') do |f|
  f.write('foo-bar')
  f.close
end

site.static_files << Jekyll::StaticFile.new(site, site.dest, 'feeds/posts', 'full.xml')

I can't find any documentation relating to this at all.

[parkr]

Our pagination generator is an example of getting around this. In your generate method, add your pages to site.pages and boom-she-boom you're good to go.