Render content for all Jekyll pages as a single JSON endpoint

README.md

Make a REST API with Jekyll

Render content for all your Jekyll pages as a single JSON endpoint

How it works

The JSON Liquid file below uses all pages in the site and renders their content.

The output is a map or hash. It uses the page's URL as the key. And the content as plain text (no markdown or HMTL) for the value.

Another approach would be building an array of pages, where each has structure: { "url": "", "content": ""}.

There is a where expression to only include HTML and markdown pages that are useful. This will filter out pages like feed.xml, robots.txt, sitemap.xml and CSS. As well as the JSON API file itself.

Set up

1. Copy the content of the JSON file below. (The .liquid extension is for syntax highlighting as a gist, but just think of it as a .json file.)
2. Add to your project as JSON file e.g. data.json in your project root. Or api/data.json.
3. Start your Jekyll server.
4. View the page where your JSON file is served from e.g. http://localhost:4000/data.json

Notes

• jsonify is used here to add double quotes around a string, not to actually render an array or hash as a JSON object. Using jsonify is safer than manual quotes, as it will handle escaping quotes for you.
• We use markdownify to convert markdown to HTML then strip HTML to convert to plain text.
• Unfortunately, we can't use Jekyll filters to process Liquid tags {{ }} or {% %}. So a custom Jekyll plugin in Ruby could be used to evaluate that.
• Jekyll cheatsheet
• The sample JSON file below shows output based on running this site locally - MichaelCurrin/jekyll-blog-demo. It's pages are index.md, about.md and 404.html.

data.json.liquid

---
---
{%- assign pages = site.pages | where_exp: "p", "p.layout != nil" -%}

{
  {%- for p in pages %}
    {{ p.url | jsonify }}: {{ p.content | markdownify | strip_html | jsonify }}
    {%- unless forloop.last %},{% endunless -%}
  {% endfor %}
}

sample-output.json

{
    "/404.html" : "\n\n\n    404\n\n    Page not found :(\n    The requested page could not be found.\n\n",
    "/about/" : "This is the base Jekyll theme. You can find out more info about customizing your Jekyll theme, as well as basic Jekyll usage documentation at jekyllrb.com\n\nSource code:\n\n\n\n\n",
    "/" : "\n\nWelcome to my Jekyll Blog Demo\n\n\n  {{ site.description }}\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n    \n        \n    \n\n"
}