JekyllMail enables you to post to your Jekyll or Octopress powered blog by email.
Once configured (see below) JekyllMail will log into a POP3 account, check for messages with
a pre-defined secret in the subject line, convert them into appropriately named files, and
save them in your _posts directory. Images will be extracted and saved in a date specific
directory under your images directory.
Once it's placed those files there it will (optionally) also add them to your blog's git repo.
This will work even if it's a bare repo and the source directory you had it save files under
is in a detached worktree.
Please note. JekyllMail assumes that the address it is checking is exclusively for its use and will only be used to post emails to a single blog. JekyllMail does support multiple blogs but you will need a seperate e-mail account for each one.
The magic is all in the subject line. In order to differentiate your email from the spam that's almost guaranteed to find your account eventually suck in the appropriate metadata A subject line for JekyllMail has two parts the title (of your post) and the metadata which will go into the YAML frontmatter Jekyll needs. The metadata is a series of key value pairs separated by slashes. One of those key value pairs must be "secret" and the secret listed in your configuration. Note that the keys must contain no spaces and be immediately followed by a colon.
<subject> || key: value / key: value / key: value, value, value
An example:
My Awesome Post || secret: more-1337 / tags: awesome, excellent, spectacular
Your secret should be short, easy to remember, easy to type, and very unlikely to show up in an e-mail from another human or spammer.
Your e-mail can be formatted in Markdown, Textile, or HTML.
There are a handful of keys that JekyllMail is specifically looking for in the subject.
All of these are optional except "secret":
- published: defaults to true. Set this to "false" to prevent the post from being published.
- markup: can be: html, markdown, md, textile, txt (textile)
- tags: expects a comma separated list of tags for your post
- slug: the "slug" for the file-name. E.g. yyyy-mm-dd-slug.extension
Image attachments will be extracted by JekyllMail and placed in dated directory that corresponds with the date of the posting.
For example If you attached flag.jpg to a post sent on July 4th 2012 it would be
stored in <images_dir>/2012/07/04/flag.jpg
JekyllMail will look for the image tags in your document that reference the image filename and update them to point to the correct published file path. For example it will convert  in a Markdown document to . Textile and HTML posts are also supported.
In practice this simply means that if you insert a  tag and attach an image named flag.jpg to the same email everything will show up as expected in your post even though JekyllMail has moved that image off to a dated subdirectory (just like the post's url).
Checkout this git repo on your server, cd into the resulting directory, and
run bundle install to make sure all the required gems are present.
JekyllMail is configured via a _config.yml file in its root directory. Within this are a series of "blog" stanzas one for each blog you'll have it checking mail for.
A single blog config file will look something like this
blogs:
- jekyll_repo: /full/path/to/jekyll/repo
source_dir: /full/path/to/jekyll/source
pop_server: mail.example.com
pop_user: [email protected]
pop_password: mypassword
secret: a_secret
markup: markdown
site_url: http://blog.example.com
commit_after_save: true
The secret is a short piece of text that must appear in the subject of
each email. This is used to filter out the spam and will never be posted.
If commit_after_save is true JekyllMail will add and commit any new post
and images to the repo specified in jekyll_repo.
The source_dir must be the absolut paths to the directory containing
the _posts and images directories. JekyllMail does not
currently support a configuration where these directories live elsewhere.
However, this is where
Please note that paths must not end with a slash.
Your pop_user doesn't have to be an e-mail address. It might just be
"jekyllmail", or whatever username you've chosen for the e-mail account.
It all depends on how your server is configured. It's probably best to use
something other than "jekyllmail" though.
You need to schedule a cronjob to run regularly to kick of JekyllMail and check for new e-mails.
To kick of JekyllMail you'll want a script that looks something like this.
You can use the run_jekyllmail.sh file that comes with JekyllMail as
a template.
#!/bin/sh
cd /full/path/to/jekyllmail
bundle exec ruby jekyllmail.rb
Save the file anywhere that isn't served up to the public, make it executable, and add a new line to your crontab to run it every five minutes or so. This is an example crontab line to do this
4,9,14,19,24,29,34,39,44,49,54,59 * * * * /home/my_username/jekyllmail_repo/run_jekyllmail.sh
When JekyllMail finds something it will save the files in the appropriate
locations and commit them to the appropriate git repo. When it does
we can leverage git's hooks/post-commit to regenerate the HTML
without needing to unnecessarily rebuild it on a regular interval.
The hooks/post-commit file in your repo should look something like this.
Don't forget to make it executable. You can use the build_site.sh file
that comes with JekyllMail as a templote.
#!/bin/sh
cd /full/path/to/blogs/worktree
bundle exec rake generate
Depending on your server's ruby / gem configuration you may have to add some
additional info to the top of those scirpts ( just below the #!/bin/sh ). On a system
with a locally installed RVM and gems directory the top of your script might
look something like this:
#!/bin/sh
[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && source "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" # Load RVM into a shell session *as a function*
GEM_PATH=$GEM_PATH:/home/my_username/.gems
PATH=$PATH:/home/my_username/.gems/bin
For more information on configuring Jekyll/Octopress to generate HTML server-side see this post on Serving Octopress from a Self-Hosted Git Repository
At the end of every run JekyllMail deletes every e-mail in the account. This is for two reasons:
- We don't want to have to maintain a list of what e-mails we've already ingested and posted
- Once an e-mail's been ingested we don't need it
- There are probably 400 spam e-mails in the account that should be deleted anyway.
- less e-mail in the box means faster runs
Ok, four reasons.
If you want to disable this set the DELETE_AFTER_RUN variable to false
There is a DEBUG variable at the top of the script. Setting it to true
will cause a bunch of debug statements to be printed during the run
and prevent it from deleting the e-mails at the end. It's much easier to
work on JekyllMail when you don't have to keep sending it new e-mails.
Have fun, and remember to send in pull-requests. :)
Check out the Issues page on Github for the current list of known issues (if any).
JekyllMail was based on a post & gist by Ted Kulp, but has come a long way since then.
JekyllMail is distributed under the MIT License.