Looping Through Jekyll Collections

2022-08-12

I recently needed to add a couple new items to my wife's personal recipe website (cookingwith.casa) which I hadn't touched in quite a while. The Jekyll build still worked fine, but I realized I was statically adding each collection by hand on the main homepage[^1].

Not so good.

Of course, this wasn't difficult at all to fix. Now everything is much more "hands free" moving forward. I figured I would share the details here in the hopes that others mind find it useful. Plus, it's my blog - so I'll do what I want!

Looping Our Collections

We want Jekyll to make things as streamlined as possible for us. This means that if I decide to add a new collection it will automatically render it along the others on the homepage.

Work smart not hard!

Let's take a look at the bare-bones collections loop:

{% for collection in site.collections %}
    <!-- Our code goes here -->
{% endfor %}

Then we need to include an if statement to avoid pulling in standard post items (or leave this in if that is desired):

{% for collection in site.collections %}
    {% if collection.label != 'posts' %}
    {% endif %}
{% endfor %}

Now for my specific use case, we want to display each collection label and then list its corresponding items below that label (see the site[collection.label] for reference)

{% for collection in site.collections %}
    {% if collection.label != 'posts' %}
        <h2>{{ collection.label }}</h2>
        <ul class="recipe-list">
        {% for item in site[collection.label] %}
            <li>
                <a href="{{ item.url }}">{{ item.title }}</a>
            </li>
        {% endfor %}
        </ul>
        <hr>
    {% endif %}
{% endfor %}

That's it! Now if I plan to add any new collections down the line, I just need to include it in the _config.yml file and I'm set. The homepage will take care of the rest once rendered.

Enjoy looping through your Jekyll collections!

Refs

1. Just the sections were statically rendered. All the recipes were pulled in dynamically - I'm not that insane!