Pagination

16 Apr 2017   #Jekyll

With many websites, especially blogs, it’s very common to break the main listing of posts up into smaller lists and display them over multiple pages. Jekyll offers a pagination plugin, so you can automatically generate the appropriate files and folders you need for paginated listings¹.

For Jekyll 3, include the jekyll-paginate plugin in your Gemfile and in your _config.yml under gems. For Jekyll 2, this is standard:

gems: [jekyll-paginate]

Pagination does not work from within Markdown or Textile files from your Jekyll site. Pagination works when called from within the HTML file, named index.html, which optionally may reside in and produce pagination from within a subdirectory, via the paginate_path configuration value.

Enable pagination

To enable pagination for your blog, add a line to the _config.yml file that specifies how many items should be displayed per page. The number should be the maximum number of Posts you’d like to be displayed per-page in the generated site:

paginate: 5

You may also specify the destination of the pagination pages:

paginate_path: "/blog/page:num/"

This will read in blog/index.html, send it each pagination page in Liquid as paginator and write the output to blog/page:num/, where :num is the pagination page number, starting with 2. If a site has 12 posts and specifies paginate: 5, Jekyll will write blog/index.html with the first 5 posts, blog/page2/index.html with the next 5 posts and blog/page3/index.html with the last 2 posts into the destination directory.

Pagination does not support tags or categories

Pagination pages through every post in the posts variable unless a post has hidden: true in its YAML Front Matter. It does not currently allow paging over groups of posts linked by a common tag or category. It cannot include any collection of documents because it is restricted to posts.

Render the paginated Posts

The next thing you need to do is to actually display your posts in a list using the paginator variable that will now be available to you. You’ll probably want to do this in one of the main pages of your site. Here’s one example of a simple way of rendering paginated Posts in a HTML file:

<!-- This loops through the paginated posts -->
{% for post in paginator.posts %}
<h1><a href="{{ post.url }}">{{ post.title }}</a></h1>
<p class="author">
	<span class="date">{{ post.date }}</span>
</p>
<div class="content">
	{{ post.content }}
</div>
{% endfor %}

<!-- Pagination links -->
<div class="pagination">
	{% if paginator.previous_page %}
	<a href="{{ paginator.previous_page_path }}" class="previous">Previous</a>
	{% else %}
	<span class="previous">Previous</span>
	{% endif %}
	<span class="page_number ">Page: {{ paginator.page }} of {{ paginator.total_pages }}</span>
	{% if paginator.next_page %}
	<a href="{{ paginator.next_page_path }}" class="next">Next</a>
	{% else %}
	<span class="next">Next</span>
	{% endif %}
</div>

Beware the page one edge-case

Jekyll does not generate a ‘page1’ folder, so the above code will not work when a /page1 link is produced. See below for a way to handle this if it’s a problem for you.

The following HTML snippet should handle page one, and render a list of each page with links to all but the current page.

<!-- Pagination links -->
{% if paginator.total_pages > 1 %}
<div class="pagination">
	{% if paginator.previous_page %}
	<a href="{{ paginator.previous_page_path | prepend: site.baseurl | replace: '//', '/' }}">&laquo; Prev</a>
	{% else %}
	<span>&laquo; Prev</span>
	{% endif %}

	{% for page in (1..paginator.total_pages) %}
	{% if page == paginator.page %}
	<em>{{ page }}</em>
	{% elsif page == 1 %}
	<a href="{{ paginator.previous_page_path | prepend: site.baseurl | replace: '//', '/' }}">{{ page }}</a>
	{% else %}
	<a href="{{ site.paginate_path | prepend: site.baseurl | replace: '//', '/' | replace: ':num', page }}">{{ page }}</a>
	{% endif %}
	{% endfor %}

	{% if paginator.next_page %}
	<a href="{{ paginator.next_page_path | prepend: site.baseurl | replace: '//', '/' }}">Next &raquo;</a>
	{% else %}
	<span>Next &raquo;</span>
	{% endif %}
</div>
{% endif %}