Simple Navigation Setup in Jekyll 3.9.0

I’ve found that there is a lot of information on the internet in regards to setting up “dynamic” navigation in Jekyll. The problem I’ve noticed is that a good amount of these implementations are overly complex. Here is the simplest way that I tend to use when building out nav elements in Jekyll (3.9.0 as of this writing).

Creating the Directories & Files

In your Jekyll project, at the top level, you need to create a directory called _data. Inside this folder we will be creating a new file called navigation.yml. The contents of this file will contain all your navigation links and they are rendered like so:

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-title:Homeurl:/-title:Articlesurl:/articles/-title:Abouturl:/about/

Dynamically Rendering the Navigation

The next and final step is rendering out the navigation with a simple loop:

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{% for item in site.data.navigation %}
    <li><ahref="{{ item.url }}"><span>{{ item.title }}</span></a></li>
{% endfor %}

Highlight Current Page

It’s also very easy to extend this method to add a CSS class based on whether a user is on the currently selected page or not:

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{% for item in site.data.navigation %}
    <li>
        {% if item.url == page.url %}
        <aclass="active"href="{{ item.url }}"><span>{{ item.title }}</span></a>
        {% else %}
        <ahref="{{ item.url }}"><span>{{ item.title }}</span></a>
        {% endif %}
    </li>
{% endfor %}

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/* Custom styling for active class */lia.active{color:red;}

Congrats! You now have fully functional, dynamic navigation on your Jekyll site.