Jekyll plugin to handle categories doesn't work on GitHub

Question

I've copied the Jekyll plugin to generate Category pages using an official source (https://github.com/recurser/jekyll-plugins) into my Github repository and it doesn't work, I keep on getting a 404 page. That said if I test on my local machine both in the Jekyll server and in the _site directory it works. Any ideas?

Answer 1

GitHub Pages does not support most plug-ins. They don't want anything crazy going on behind the scenes.

Here's how I do categories with Github Pages. It is not wholly automatic, as it requires a separate .html file for each category you want to set up. But it works without any plugins or wizardry on Github Pages.

Create a categoryname.html file in your root directory. For example, hardware.html for a Hardware category. Run a for loop on all of the site's posts and check the post.category

<div class="posts">
  {% for post in site.posts %}

    {% assign author = site.authors[post.author] %}
    {{ author.display_name }}

  {% if post.category == 'Hardware' %}
  <div class="post">
    <h1 class="post-title">
      <a href="{{ post.url }}">{{ post.title }}</a>
    </h1>
    {{ post.content }}
  </div>
  {% endif %}
  {% endfor %}
</div>

In your posts, you would use the YAML header to add the category to the post. Like the code below:

---
layout: post
title: How We Built a Hardware Product
author: Author Name
category: Hardware
---

That should do it. It'll create a /hardware/ page that will include all of your posts with the Hardware category. Make sure you're case-sensitive on your YAML and category names (hardware != Hardware and category != Category).

Answer 2

Another possible solution:
If you don't want to generate your site locally and push the created HTML files to GitHub (like David Jacquel suggested in his answer), you can create one single page with all categories.

Check out this answer:
An easy way to support tags in a jekyll blog
(Note: I'm using tags instead of categories there, but both work exactly the same way in Jekyll as far as I know. So you can just take my code and replace site.tags by site.categories)

I admit, one page per category looks nicer, but my solution has the advantage that it works on Github Pages (because it's just vanilla Liquid, no plugin).

---

EDIT:

In the meantime, I wrote a blog post how to make separate pages per category without using a plugin:
Separate pages per tag/category with Jekyll (without plugins)

Answer 3

Github pages only support a small number of Jekyll plugins.

If you want to use your plugins, you'll have to generate your site locally and push it on github pages. If you do this, add a .nojekyll file at the root of your repository to tell github to not process you files.