Recently, I migrated my personal website from Wordpress to GitHub Pages using Jekyll. After some trial and error, I managed to have everything up and running. However, Jekyll tagging (i.e., generating the pages that contain a collection of posts filtered by a tag) requires additional plugins which are not supported by GitHub Pages. Long Qian wrote a fantastic tutorial on how to implement this functionality with a Python script. Unfortunately, this still requires running the script, adding the files to the staging area, committing them, and pushing them to GitHub. That’s a lot of steps for every time that I want to add a new tag. Not only is it prone to errors, but let’s be honest: ain’t nobody got time for that.

Therefore, I automated the whole process. I adapted Long’s solution and embedded it in a more comprehensive script, update_tags.py. Now, I let GitPython handle the Git part (make sure you installed it beforehand). This way, after I finished updating/creating a post with new tags (and pushing those files to GitHub), I can run update_tags and let it do the rest: fish the tags used across all posts, create the corresponding posts, and commit and push these changes to GitHub in a single go. To keep things tidy, I recommend running this script when having a clean working space (nothing to commit/push).

Please note that Long’s original script reads the tags from posts that are formatted as follows:

---
layout: post
title: Jekyll Tags on Github Pages
description: Github Pages with Jekyll are cool!
tags: blog github-page jekyll
---

I adapted the script to read tags from posts that are formatted differently:

---
layout: post
title: Jekyll Tags on GitHub Pages
description: GitHub Pages with Jekyll are cool!
tags:
  - blog
  - github-page
  - jekyll
---

You can find all the files of my website in my GitHub repository.

Update: Nicholas Pachulski came up with a workaround that automates the process (a bit) using a gem. You can check it out here. I haven’t tried out myself, but it looks promising!

If you have any comments, questions or feedback, leave them in the comments below or drop me a line on Twitter (@amoncadatorres). Moreover, if you found this useful, fun, or just want to show your appreciation, you can always buy me a cookie. Cheers!