Use site.show_drafts in templates if the local and live versions of your Jekyll site need to be different.
Yesterday I published a post about Jekyll collections. Today I checked Google Analytics to see if
anybody looked at my site. 99 visits! Hey, nice. But I also noticed several “localhost” entries: those times I
was double-checking my page locally with jekyll serve -Dw counted as visits, because the browser saw
the analytics code and dutifully notified Google’s servers. So - less than 99 visits to my site. Oh well.
At some point I may disconnect Analytics altogether and go back to analyzing server logs directly. That certainly solves the localhost entries. Today I only want to adjust Jekyll’s build process so that it skips analytics code when building drafts.
Turns out that the configuration documentation lists show_drafts: null down there in the default configuration. I only needed an unless block in my template.
{% unless site.show_drafts %} {% include analytics.html %}{% endunless %}I added a similar block for comments, since Disqus handles those - another external service I don’t need in draft mode.
You may need something more elaborate than this for your needs, such as ad code for a live site and a
placeholder image when building drafts. No matter what the details, site.show_drafts provides the key that
you need.