Do not use welcome to Jekyll page

Help
1

I do not want the welcome to Jekyll page that was generated when I created a new site, to appear in my site as it is irrelevant to my readers. I excluded it in the excludes section of my config.yml and I am now getting the following error when I rebuild my site:

     Error: could not read file /home/jgossage/gems/gems/jekyll-4.0.0/lib/site_template/_posts/0000-00-00-welcome-to-jekyll.markdown.erb: Invalid date '<%= Time.now.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %z') %>': Document 'gems/gems/jekyll-4.0.0/lib/site_template/_posts/0000-00-00-welcome-to-jekyll.markdown.erb' does not have a valid date in the YAML front matter.
     ERROR: YOUR SITE COULD NOT BE BUILT:
            ------------------------------------
            Invalid date '<%= Time.now.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %z') %>': Document 'gems/gems/jekyll-4.0.0/lib/site_template/_posts/0000-00-00-welcome-to-jekyll.markdown.erb' does not have a valid date in the YAML front matter.

What is the correct way of ensuring that this page does not appear on my site?

2

what is the name of the page? it looks like it was a post? why did you not just delete/edit it?

the error looks to be saying it is missing a date on the post - posts are required to have a date.

I have not built the default site in quite a while so I can’t remember what all is there, but you should be editing it not excluding it I would think.

3

The primary reason behind the error you’re seeing above is because you overrode the default excludes. i.e. by having the following in your config file:

exclude:
  - _posts/2019-09-07-welcome-to-jekyll.markdown

Your vendor/ directory is no longer excluded.

The fix for this error is to ensure that you’ve vendor/ listed in your exclude: list if you’re customizing it. Depending on what version of Jekyll was used to create the boilerplate, there may or may not be a comment above the exclude: key in your config file.

However, Jekyll 4.0 has a patch built-in so vendor/ is always excluded even if users forget to exclude it explicitly.

Regarding the actual question this thread is about, the easiest solution is to just delete the welcome post.

6

This is not my file. It is provided by Jekyll when the jekyll new command is run to generate a new site. Since it contains nothing except information about Jekyll, it will not be interesting to my reaaders.

8

I was running Jekyll 4.0.0.0 so it appears that the patch you mentioned did not help. I will try modifying the excludes.

10

Changing the excludes as you suggested worked, thank you.

11

If you encountered this issue while using Jekyll 4.0, then it is a bug that has to be fixed.
Is your site’s source-code publicly available on GitHub or similar…? I’d like to confirm that you were indeed running Jekyll 4.0 and encountered the error nevertheless.

12

I am still developing and teaching myself so this is not code that will be deployed. I am just trying to figure out how things work. It is separate to anything else so I could create a new repository. Would this help? Would the output from any other command help you confirm that I was running 4.0.0? Here is the output from gem list that shows Jekyll 4.0.0 installed.

activesupport (4.2.11.1)
addressable (2.7.0)
bigdecimal (default: 1.3.4)
bundler (2.0.2)
cmath (default: 1.0.0)
coffee-script (2.4.1)
coffee-script-source (1.11.1)
colorator (1.1.0)
commonmarker (0.17.13)
concurrent-ruby (1.1.5)
csv (default: 1.0.0)
date (default: 1.0.0)
dbm (default: 1.0.0)
did_you_mean (1.2.0)
dnsruby (1.61.3)
em-websocket (0.5.1)
etc (default: 1.0.0)
ethon (0.12.0)
eventmachine (1.2.7)
execjs (2.7.0)
faraday (0.15.4)
fcntl (default: 1.0.0)
ffi (1.11.1)
fiddle (default: 1.0.0)
fileutils (default: 1.0.2)
forwardable-extended (2.6.0)
gdbm (default: 2.0.0)
gemoji (3.0.1)
github-pages (198)
github-pages-health-check (1.16.1)
html-pipeline (2.12.0)
http_parser.rb (0.6.0)
i18n (1.6.0, 0.9.5)
io-console (default: 0.4.6)
ipaddr (default: 1.2.0)
jekyll (4.0.0, 3.8.5)
jekyll-avatar (0.6.0)
jekyll-coffeescript (1.1.1)
jekyll-commonmark (1.3.1)
jekyll-commonmark-ghpages (0.1.5)
jekyll-default-layout (0.1.4)
jekyll-feed (0.12.1, 0.11.0)
jekyll-gist (1.5.0)
jekyll-github-metadata (2.12.1)
jekyll-mentions (1.4.1)
jekyll-optional-front-matter (0.3.0)
jekyll-paginate (1.1.0)
jekyll-readme-index (0.2.0)
jekyll-redirect-from (0.14.0)
jekyll-relative-links (0.6.0)
jekyll-remote-theme (0.3.1)
jekyll-sass-converter (2.0.0, 1.5.2)
jekyll-seo-tag (2.6.1, 2.5.0)
jekyll-sitemap (1.2.0)
jekyll-swiss (0.4.0)
jekyll-theme-architect (0.1.1)
jekyll-theme-cayman (0.1.1)
jekyll-theme-dinky (0.1.1)
jekyll-theme-hacker (0.1.1)
jekyll-theme-leap-day (0.1.1)
jekyll-theme-merlot (0.1.1)
jekyll-theme-midnight (0.1.1)
jekyll-theme-minimal (0.1.1)
jekyll-theme-modernist (0.1.1)
jekyll-theme-primer (0.5.3)
jekyll-theme-slate (0.1.1)
jekyll-theme-tactile (0.1.1)
jekyll-theme-time-machine (0.1.1)
jekyll-titles-from-headings (0.5.1)
jekyll-watch (2.2.1)
jemoji (0.10.2)
json (default: 2.1.0)
kramdown (2.1.0, 1.17.0)
kramdown-parser-gfm (1.1.0)
liquid (4.0.3, 4.0.0)
listen (3.1.5)
mercenary (0.3.6)
mini_portile2 (2.4.0)
minima (2.5.1, 2.5.0)
minitest (5.11.3, 5.10.3)
multipart-post (2.1.1)
net-telnet (0.1.1)
nokogiri (1.10.4)
octokit (4.14.0)
openssl (default: 2.1.1)
pathutil (0.16.2)
power_assert (0.2.7)
psych (default: 3.0.2)
public_suffix (4.0.1, 3.1.1)
rake (12.3.1)
rb-fsevent (0.10.3)
rb-inotify (0.10.0)
rdoc (default: 6.0.1)
rouge (3.10.0, 3.9.0, 2.2.1)
ruby-enum (0.7.2)
ruby_dep (1.5.0)
rubyzip (1.2.4)
safe_yaml (1.0.5)
sass (3.7.4)
sass-listen (4.0.0)
sassc (2.2.0)
sawyer (0.8.2)
scanf (default: 1.0.0)
sdbm (default: 1.0.0)
stringio (default: 0.0.1)
strscan (default: 1.0.0)
terminal-table (1.8.0)
test-unit (3.2.5)
thread_safe (0.3.6)
typhoeus (1.3.1)
tzinfo (1.2.5)
unicode-display_width (1.6.0)
webrick (default: 1.4.2)
zlib (default: 1.0.0)

Is there anything else I can do to help?

13

I have uploaded a copy of the site to GitHub. It contains more than what you are looking for, but it does include the complete site.

14

@caolin Thank you for providing the link to the repository.
I cloned it locally and experimented with it.

The exact error that you mentioned in this thread (regarding _posts/0000-00-00-welcome-to-jekyll.markdown.erb) couldn’t be reproduced.

So, there’s no bug in that patch…