Website: How to create drafts in Jekyll

In case you haven’t noticed, I use Jekyll to create my blog from markdown files. And I typically write short posts, mostly TILs like this one. But I am trying to write longer, more thoughtful posts, which means that I will likely need to write drafts of these posts.

Well Jekyll has a nice feature where you can save these drafts in a folder (_drafts) separate from the one used to contain your completed posts (_posts). That way the draft won’t be made available at your website until you are ready to move it to the _posts folder.

But wait! There’s more!!!

You can view the posts (most likely locally) in the _drafts folder using the --draftsflag:

bundle exec jekyll serve --drafts

Also, the posts in the _drafts folder typically don’t have the date in the file name. i.e instead of 2020-01-01-post-1.md, it would be post-1.md. You add the date after you move it to the _posts folder.

If you want to keep the dates in the filename of the drafts, then run:

bundle exec jekyll serve --drafts --future