jekyll-md

A Jekyll plugin that outputs .md files with Liquid templates rendered but Markdown left intact.

Your post at /blog/2026/04/11/my-post.html gets a sibling at /blog/2026/04/11/my-post.md — same content, Liquid resolved, Markdown preserved.

Install

Add to your Gemfile:

group :jekyll_plugins do
  gem "jekyll-md"
end

Then bundle install.

Or copy markdown_renderer.rb into your _plugins/ directory.

Configure

Add to _config.yml:

markdown_renderer:
  enabled: true
  scope: "all"        # "all" | "posts" | "pages" | "tagged"

By default, .md files are placed alongside their .html counterparts. To group them in a subdirectory instead:

markdown_renderer:
  output_dir: "md"    # all .md files land in _site/md/

Options

Option	Default	Description
enabled	true	Master switch
scope	"all"	Which docs get .md output: all, posts, pages, or tagged
output_dir	none	Set to group .md files in a subdirectory (e.g. "md")
preserve_front_matter	true	Include YAML front matter in output
front_matter_fields	all	List of front matter keys to keep (omit to keep all)

Per-page opt-in

With scope: "tagged", only pages with markdown_output: true in their front matter get .md output.

How it works

Jekyll's pipeline: Front Matter → Liquid → Markdown → HTML → Layouts.

This plugin intercepts after Liquid rendering but before Markdown-to-HTML conversion. It creates a synthetic page with a passthrough converter that writes the result as .md.

License

MIT