Story

I love Jekyll, especially the Datafiles[0] feature, which lets you use CSV/JSON/YAML files and iterate through them. Mixed with the Jekyll Data Pages generator[1], which lets you create a page for every row in your dataset, it is a very powerful combination.

However, Liquid is a terrible language for data-mangling, and simple filtering/sorting/merging can become very annoying. So I wrote a Jekyll SQLite plugin that lets you use the same data interface in Jekyll/Liquid, but backed by a SQLite file(s).

It gives you the simplicity of the Baked Data pattern[2], and the flexibility of using SQL for data-wrangling, within a static site generator.

As a demo, I took the northwind dataset, and generated a site[3] with a few sample queries[4]. It demos both site-level, and page-level queries alongside data-pages generator to generate a page for every product/category/customer.

I've been using this across a few sites in production for almost a year, looking for feedback on usage semantics and feature suggestions.

[0]: https://jekyllrb.com/docs/datafiles/

[1]: https://github.com/avillafiorita/jekyll-datapage_gen

[2]: https://simonwillison.net/2021/Jul/28/baked-data/

[3]: https://northwind.captnemo.in/

[4]: https://github.com/captn3m0/northwind