Data Files

In addition to the built-in variables available from Jigyll, you can specify your own custom data that can be accessed via Liquid.

Jigyll loads data files from the _data directory and makes them available as site.data. This lets you avoid repetition in your templates and set site-specific options without changing _config.yml.

Supported formats

Differs from Jekyll. Jigyll reads YAML (.yml, .yaml), JSON (.json), and CSV (.csv) files. Jekyll additionally supports TSV; Jigyll does not. One more caveat:

• CSV files parse into rows of strings (site.data.members[0][1]), not header-keyed maps — Jekyll's header-row convention (member.name) does not apply. The csv_reader/tsv_reader config options are not supported.

Subdirectories of _data are namespaced by folder name, just as in Jekyll: _data/orgs/jekyll.yml is available as site.data.orgs.jekyll.

Example: list of members

In _data/members.yml:

- name: Eric Mill
  github: konklone

- name: Parker Moore
  github: parkr

This data can be accessed via site.data.members (the file's basename determines the variable name, so avoid two data files with the same basename but different extensions).

You can now render the list of members in a template:

<ul>
{% for member in site.data.members %}
  <li>
    <a href="https://github.com/{{ member.github }}">
      {{ member.name }}
    </a>
  </li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>

Example: accessing a specific author

Pages and posts can also access a specific data item. In _data/people.yml:

dave:
    name: David Smith
    twitter: DavidSilvaSmith

The author can then be specified as a page variable in a post's front matter:

---
title: sample post
author: dave
---

{% assign author = site.data.people[page.author] %}
<a rel="author"
  href="https://twitter.com/{{ author.twitter }}"
  title="{{ author.name }}">
    {{ author.name }}
</a>