metalsmith-extract-dates :alarm_clock:

A Metalsmith plugin to extract date information from filenames. Like Jekyll did.

This plugin will extract date information, like 2019-06-10-..., remove it from the filename (if you want) and add it as the date key on the file's metadata.

Why would you want this? Now your source files are sorted by date. :boom:

Installation

From NPM:

$ npm install --save-dev metalsmith-extract-dates
$ yarn add --dev metalsmith-extract-dates

From GitHub:

$ npm install --save-dev https://github.com/ryanq/metalsmith-extract-dates
$ yarn add --dev https://github.com/ryanq/metalsmith-extract-dates

Options

Options for configuring metalsmith-extract-dates can be passed as an argument to the plugin function for the JavaScript API or as the value of the metalsmith-extract-dates key for the CLI. The options are:

• pattern: Only process files that match the pattern. The default is '**'.
• rename: Re-key the file metadata by the filename with the date information removed. The default is true.

pattern

This is the standard Metalsmith pattern option. Only files that match the pattern will be processed. Skipped files are logged. The default is '**', which will process all files.

rename

If rename is true, change the key for each file that is processed and matches the format to the same file path, but with the date information removed. If posts/2019-06-10-extracting-dates-with-metalsmith.md is processed with rename set, the key would be replaced with posts/extracting-dates-with-metalsmith.md. This option is true by default.

Debugging

metalsmith-extract-dates uses the debug package for logging during the build. Enable logging by setting DEBUG to include extract-dates:

$ DEBUG=extract-dates yarn build
yarn run v1.13.0
$ node build/index.js
  extract-dates skipping file pages/about.md: doesn't match options.pattern +0ms
  extract-dates processing file: posts/2018-09-12-post1.md +0ms
  extract-dates set date: 2018-09-12 +2ms
  extract-dates replaced posts/2018-09-12-post-1.md with posts/post-1.md +0ms
  extract-dates processing file: posts/2019-01-31-post-2.md +0ms
  extract-dates set date: 2019-01-31 +0ms
  extract-dates replaced posts/2019-01-31-post-2.md with posts/post-2.md +0ms
✨  Done in 0.78s.

To-Dos

• [ ] Allow passing an array of patterns
• [ ] Allow custom formats for date information in filenames