Repository metadata and plugin support for GitHub Pages

We’ve added several commonly requested features, making GitHub Pages an even better place to host websites for you and your projects.

Repository metadata

First, Jekyll sites on GitHub Pages now have access to some useful repository information such as the latest SHA1; the project title, owner, and description; common URLs like the download and clone URL; and the exact version of various dependencies used to build your site like Jekyll or Ruby.

Within pages and posts, repository information is available within the site.github namespace, and can be displayed, for example, using {% raw %}{{ site.github.project_title }}{% endraw %}.

See the project metadata documentation for the complete list.

@mentions, emoji, and redirects

Second, GitHub Pages now supports three Jekyll plugins:

• Jemoji and jekyll-mentions enable emoji and @mentions in your Jekyll posts and pages to work just like you’d expect when interacting with a repository on GitHub.com.
• Jekyll-redirect-from provides an easy way to redirect visitors to the proper url when the filename changes for a post or a page.

For more information on using plugins with GitHub Pages, see the GitHub Pages plugin documentation.

Happy documenting!

Written by

Ben Balter

@benbalter

Ben Balter is Chief of Staff for Security at GitHub, the world’s largest software development platform. Previously, as a Staff Technical Program manager for Enterprise and Compliance, Ben managed GitHub’s on-premises and SaaS enterprise offerings, and as the Senior Product Manager overseeing the platform’s Trust and Safety efforts, Ben shipped more than 500 features in support of community management, privacy, compliance, content moderation, product security, platform health, and open source workflows to ensure the GitHub community and platform remained safe, secure, and welcoming for all software developers. Before joining GitHub’s Product team, Ben served as GitHub’s Government Evangelist, leading the efforts to encourage more than 2,000 government organizations across 75 countries to adopt open source philosophies for code, data, and policy development.