After a six-month hiatus from this site, I could not remember much. I noticed I had a couple of posts in a _drafts folder within my site. Here’s a refresher on working with drafts in Jekyll:

  • Location
    • Drafts live in a _drafts subfolder.
  • Viewing (no future dates)
    • To see drafts in a local build of your site that don’t have a future date, add the --drafts flag when you run Jekyll, as follows (assuming you are using bundle exec): 
      bundle exec jekyll serve --drafts
  • Viewing future-dated drafts
    • If you date your drafts in the future, run Jekyll with the additional --future flag (thanks Edgar!): 
      bundle exec jekyll serve --drafts --future
  • Naming a draft
    • The Jekyll documentation says—somewhat misleadingly—”Drafts are posts without a date in the filename.” But my drafts had dates in the file names.
    • It turns out you can put a date in the filename, or in the file’s front matter. Based on a very helpful post from Redgreenrepeat (archived at archive.org), it seems that Jekyll uses these rules to save and display drafts:
      • With no date anywhere in the file, it will be stored and diplayed according to its modified date. (Per the Jekyll documentation, a non-dated draft “will be assigned the value modification time of the draft file for its date.”)
      • With a date in the file name but not the front matter, it will display at the date in the file name.
      • With a date in the front matter, it will display at that date, regardless of whether there’s a date in the file name.
  • Publishing is simple: move the file to _posts and (if needed) rename it accordingly.
  • Troubleshooting
    • If you aren’t seeing a draft you know is there, you may need to:
      • Search for it
      • Manually enter a URL with the date that you think has been assigned to the draft
      • Use the --futures flag as noted above