YAML Front Matter
Any files that contain a YAML front matter block will be processed by Jekyll as special files. The front matter must be the first thing in the file and takes the form of:
--- layout: post title: Blogging Like a Hacker ---
Between the triple-dashed lines, you can set predefined variables (see below for a reference) or custom data of your own.
IMPORTANT! (Especially for Windows users)
When you use UTF-8 encoding for your file, make sure that no BOM header chars exist in your file or everything will blow up!
| Variable | Description |
layout |
If set, this specifies the layout file to use. Use the layout file name without file extension. Layout files must be placed in the _layouts directory. |
permalink |
If you need your processed URLs to be something other than the default /year/month/day/title.html then you can set this variable and it will be used as the final URL. |
published |
Set to false if you don’t want a post to show up when the site is generated. |
category/categories |
Instead of placing posts inside of folders, you can specify one or more categories that the post belongs to. When the site is generated the post will act as though it had been set with these categories normally. Categories (plural key) can be specified as a YAML list or a space-separated string. |
tags |
Similar to categories, one or multiple tags can be added to a post. Also like categories, tags can be specified as a YAML list or a space-separated string. |
Any variables in the front matter that are not predefined are mixed into the data that is sent to the Liquid templating engine during the conversion. For instance, if you set a title, you can use that in your layout to set the page title:
<title>{{ page.title }}</title>
These are available out-of-the-box to be used in the front-matter for a post.
| Variable | Description |
date |
A date here overrides the date from the name of the post. This can be used to ensure correct sorting of posts. |