How can I get a post excerpt in Jekyll?

Question

I'm creating a new blog using Jekyll.

On the main page, there will be a list of my 10 most recent posts.

The entries on this list will include a title, the post date, and an excerpt, most likely the first paragraph.

I'm only familiar with using Jekyll for basic templates, so I can either put only a variable in the page, or include the entire post.

Is there a way to somehow avoid using post.content in the paginator, and only include up to a certain point in the post, which I define (e.g. ``{% endexcerpt %}`?

Solution 1

Sure, you can use {{ post.excerpt }} in place of {{ post.content }}.

You can also manually override the automatically generated excerpts if you don't like them.

Full documentation on how to do this here: http://jekyllrb.com/docs/posts/#post-excerpts

Solution 2

Something like {{ post.content | strip_html | truncatewords: 50 }} produces a more consistent excerpt. It gets the first 50 words and strips any formatting.

Solution 3

To get a custom length excerpt for each post, you can add a excerpt_separator variable in front matter of your post. If you set this variable to <!--end_excerpt-->, then post.excerpt will include all content before <!--end_excerpt-->.

---
excerpt_separator: <!--end_excerpt-->
---

This is included in excerpts.

This is also included in excerpts.

<!--end_excerpt-->

But this is not.

To save yourself the effort of adding excerpt_separator to front matter of each post, you can simply set it in _config.yml.

Solution 4

Use

 {{ post.content | markdownify | strip_html | truncatewords: 50 }}

instead of {{ post.excerpt }} or {{ post.content }}.

This will give consistent length blocks of unformatted text with no raw markdown content in them. Tidy.

---

Thanks to this comment by @karolis-ramanauskas for the answer, I've made it a proper answer so it can get better visibility.

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Comments

[barfuin]

Also see this answer.

[adrianmc]

Agreed. This is much better. I used to use excerpt and it would give all kinds of quirks about where it breaks (seemingly only on the first paragraph).

[eQ19]

Remember to use <!--more--> in the actual post to tell Jekyll where it should 'cut' the post for the excerpt content or set excerpt_separator globally in your _config.yml.

[Karolis Ramanauskas]

How would you deal with links though? For example, if you have content like this "This is a post. And a [link](www.link.com)", then the snippet you posted would display the entire raw text rather than being intelligent about it and showing link simply as text.

[Karolis Ramanauskas]

Got the answer, use {{ post.content | markdownify | strip_html | truncatewords: 50 }}

[Ferit]

How to get post.content but without post.title? I don't want title in post excerpt.

[taylor]

Hi, I found that this sentence could only be used in English, When I want to write a Chinese article, how can I use this function? Thanks!

[Joel Meyer-Hamme]

You can use truncate: 50 for the first 50 characters. I'm not sure how well this works with Chinese or other Utf-8 sequences without an example, though. post.excerpt should probably be improved at some point, I'd personally much rather use a plugin to do that, than stringing together a bunch of liquid filters. shopify.github.io/liquid/filters/truncate

[Teng L]

truncate: 50 truncates the first 50 characters but it is not consistent. For my Chinese posts I usually use this generic method, and provide an override if the formatting doesn't work out well by default.