Jekyll Manager - Architecture

How Jekyll Manager hooks into Jekyll

Jekyll Manager piggybacks on Jekyll’s built-in Webrick server. We rely on the JekyllAdmin monkey patch to the jekyll serve command to hook in two Sinatra servers, one to serve the static front end that lives in lib/jekyll-admin/public via /admin, and one to serve the Ruby API via /_api. Once the Sinatra servers are mounted, they work just like any other Jekyll server (and we rely on third-party plugins like sinatra-json and sinatra-cross_origin).

Note: Since there are two Sinatra servers that might call site.process concurrently, Jekyll Manager disables --watch flag to prevent a race condition between these servers that might cause incorrect responses for the API. This ensures that the site is regenerated by only the process that Jekyll Manager runs.

How Jekyll Manager formats Jekyll objects for the API

Whenever possible, we want to stay as close to the to_liquid.to_json representation of Jekyll’s internal object structure as possible, so that we’re (A) using data structure that developers are used to, and (B) so that we can benefit from upstream improvements. To do this, we have the JekyllAdmin::APIable module, which gets included in native Jekyll objects like Pages and Documents to add a to_api method which we can call to generate hashes for use in the API.