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Make environment variables available in Jekyll Liquid templates
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environment-variables-jekyll-templates.md

Environment variables in Jekyll templates

This is one way to pass some data (API tokens, etc.) to your Jekyll templates without putting it in your _config.yml file (which is likely to be committed in your GitHub repository).

Copy the environment_variables.rb plugin to your _plugins folder, and add any environment variable you wish to have available on the site.config object.

In a Liquid template, that information will be available through the site object. For example, _layouts/default.html could contain:

<head>
   <!-- ... -->
  {% if site.env == 'production' %}
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="/build/style.min.css">
  {% else %}
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="/style.css">
  {% endif %}
</head>

Running jekyll build will use style.css by default. If you set export JEKYLL_ENV=production before running jekyll build, it will use style.min.css.

Raw
environment_variables.rb
# Plugin to add environment variables to the `site` object in Liquid templates
module Jekyll
class EnvironmentVariablesGenerator < Generator
def generate(site)
site.config['env'] = ENV['JEKYLL_ENV'] || 'development'
# Add other environment variables to `site.config` here...
end
end
end
@npras
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npras commented Feb 17, 2014

Thanks! This was useful!

@morenoh149
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anyway to get this working on github pages? pages.github.com

@0xcaff
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0xcaff commented Apr 10, 2014

@morenoh149 No. You can use CI though.

@aminalhazwani
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I understood that you write s3_id: <%= ENV['S3_ID'] %> in your s3_config.yml, but where do you store the actual id. In which file? and how?

@cjwirth
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cjwirth commented May 23, 2015

👍 This was pretty helpful.

@igolden
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igolden commented Jul 18, 2015

Useful plugin and well executed. thanks.

@yordis
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yordis commented Aug 17, 2015

@morenoh149 @caffinatedmonkey you can use site.github if that is defined then you are in github page. Read the first line https://help.github.com/articles/repository-metadata-on-github-pages/#available-repository-metadata

@duleorlovic
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This plugin is not needed since there exists JEKYLL_ENV
http://www.csinaction.com/2015/02/07/environments-in-jekyll-aka-jekyll_env/

@errordeveloper
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jekyll.environment is a thing these days 👍

@k-funk
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k-funk commented Jul 29, 2016 •
edited

Thanks for giving me a good start on what I was working on.

For what it's worth to other people, I wanted to include all vars in /.env, but not all environment variables loaded (which ENV) has, and didn't want to call them by name in application logic, so I used the dotenv gem and get those env vars in my code with {{ site.config.env.ENV_VAR1 }} :

# Plugin to add environment variables to the `site` object in Liquid templates
require 'dotenv'

module Jekyll
  class EnvironmentVariablesGenerator < Generator
    def generate(site)
      site.config['env'] = Dotenv.load
    end
  end
end

@crazy-max
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If you want to use your conf for some plugins it's better to raise the priority to highest.
And why not pretty print the result (in debug mode) :

module Jekyll

  class EnvironmentVariablesGenerator < Generator
    priority :highest

    def generate(site)
      site.config['env'] = ENV['JEKYLL_ENV'] || 'development'
      # Add other environment variables to `site.config` here...
      Jekyll.logger.debug site.config.to_yaml
    end
  end

end

@jveillet
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jveillet commented Jan 24, 2017 •
edited

I was just searching to do that, very helpfull thanks! 👍
As someone else poited out, I required the dotenv gem and it works wonders.

@mosinski
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mosinski commented May 6, 2017

@k-funk nice tip thx 👍

@ScottA38
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This plugin is not needed since there exists JEKYLL_ENV
http://www.csinaction.com/2015/02/07/environments-in-jekyll-aka-jekyll_env/
@duleorlovic @errordeveloper

Your answers are very old so sorry for the question - how exactly does Jekyll.environment allow you to add custom ENV variables in _config?

@leogzyl
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leogzyl commented Jan 22, 2023

Really helpful, thanks!

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