In this post I will explain how to use Jekyll Scheduler a bash utility to schedule Jekyll post upload.

Jekyll Scheduler is a bash script (executed preferably by CircleCI nightly triggers) that schedule your posts.

Requires a that you Jekyll repository has a CircleCI environment set.

You’ll need to access to the repository of this script to download some files that you’ll need in this tutorial.

Setup steps

1. Clone this repo outside of your Jekyll site.
   • git clone https://github.com/uta-org/jekyll-scheduler.git
2. Create a sch.ini file, with this configuration:

schedule_date=<date in YYYY-MM-DD format>
schedule_post=<url to your posts>

Example:

schedule_date=2019-03-31
schedule_post=2019-03-31-how-schedule-posts-in-jekyll.md
schedule_date=2019-03-31
schedule_post=2019-03-31-configuring-custom-domains-github-pages-part-1.md
schedule_date=2019-04-01
schedule_post=2019-04-01-configuring-custom-domains-github-pages-part-2.md

This will schedule two posts for 2019-03-31 and one for 2019-04-01.

1. Create a “script” folder on your site root path.
   • mkdir script
2. Copy this script and the ini file into “script” folder.
   • cp sch.ini <path to your jekyll site>/script/sch.ini && cp get_scheduled_posts.sh <path to your jekyll site>/script/get_scheduled_posts.sh
3. Create a folder called “scheduled-posts” inside your site root folder.
   • mkdir scheduled-posts
4. Copy this on your circle.yml configuration file:

Don’t use this method!

defaults: &defaults
    working_directory: ~/repo
    
version: 2
jobs:
  # Your jobs here... 
    schedule_posts:
        <<: *defaults
        docker:
          - image: circleci/ruby:2.6.0-node
        filters:
            branches:
                only:
                  - gh-pages-ci
                ignore:
                  - master
        steps:
            - checkout 
            - run:
                name: Executing scheduler
                command: bash ~/repo/script/get_scheduled_posts.sh
workflows:
    version: 2
    test-deploy:
        jobs:
            - schedule_posts:
                filters:
                    branches:
                        only:
                          - gh-pages-ci
                        ignore:
                          - master              
    nightly:
        triggers:
            - schedule:
                cron: "0 0 * * *"
                filters:
                    branches:
                        only:
                            - gh-pages-ci
                        ignore:
                            - master
        jobs:
            - schedule_posts

Note: This will execute the scheduler any time you make a push. Or every day at 12AM.

Note2: This is not the optimal way to accomplish the task, I strongly recommend you to use this as an unique step in your main job, and put this after checkout happens. See my example at this file.

            - run:
                name: Executing scheduler
                command: bash ~/repo/script/get_scheduled_posts.sh

1. You’ll need to sync all your scheduled posts in local, for accomplish that create a Git alias in your environment to automatize this on the local-side.

For this, you’ll need to download scheduler-alias.sh, with the following command:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/uta-org/jekyll-scheduler/master/scheduler-alias.sh -O ~/UnitedTeamworkAssociation/scheduler-alias.sh

And then, create an alias for it:

git config --global alias.publish '!script="$HOME/UnitedTeamworkAssociation/scheduler-alias.sh" && bash "$script"'

All together:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/uta-org/jekyll-scheduler/master/scheduler-alias.sh -O ${HOME}/UnitedTeamworkAssociation/scheduler-alias.sh && git config --global alias.publish '!script="$HOME/UnitedTeamworkAssociation/scheduler-alias.sh" && bash "$script"'

So, instead of using git push use git publish.

Note: This command must be called from you repository root.

1. Enjoy!

How does the script works?

It simply copies the files required by the date from the “scheduled-posts” folder to the “_posts” one.

So, just simply write posts as you normally do.

Best regards!