Introduction
A basic Jekyll site has a file structure similar to this:
In this tutorial we’ll take a high-level look at what these directories mean. Don’t stress if you don’t pick up these concepts now, we’ll go over these topics in-depth in later tutorials.
_config.yml
Holds the configuration for your Jekyll site. This is commonly used to:
- Set global variables on the site
- Configure collections or defaults
- Specify runtime variables we want to run every time
_drafts
All our unpublished blog posts. This allows us to work on blog posts without publishing them to the live site.
_includes
Page snippets which can be included throughout our site. Includes are often used for page sections which are duplicated across the site like a newsletter subscribe form.
_layouts
Templates which wrap around content. All the repeating HTML on our site like the header, footer and navigation typically live in a layout.
_posts
Contains our blog posts usually written in Markdown.
_data
_data contains YAML, JSON and CSV files. The data in these files can be used throughout the Jekyll site.
_site
Once Jekyll has built our site it puts the entire static site including all our assets in _site.
.jekyll-metadata
This file is used by Jekyll’s incremental build feature to keep track of the files which have changed.
Other Files/Folders
Files with front matter are processed and output to _site on a build. Files without front matter (typically CSS, JavaScript and image files) are copied straight to _site on a build.