Solving Jekyll

Using the Jekyll configuration to stop server-side files getting cleared each time a new build is generated

Since last year I've been able to publish updates with images to my own site and syndicate to Twitter no problem. As a novice to both Jekyll and Git I'd not understood entirely why I was loosing all the images uploaded each time I pushed a new build.

What was happening?

Well quite simply each time a new build is pushed to my server: Jekyll regenerates the entire site based on my local setup which hasn't any of the images I'd uploaded.

My interim solution was to make a point of downloading all of the images on my server prior to pushing any new builds, every time! This wasn't ideal so I read deeper into documentation for both Git workflow and Jekyll.

The better solution...

It was staring me right in the face and only required one line of code; however getting the syntax correct is crucial for the directory path which isn't widely demonstrated.

keep_files: ['uploads/images']

This is added to _config.yml and simply specifies which files or folders to keep in place when regenerating a Jekyll build. In my case the folder is uploads/images.