How can I show just the most recent post on my home page with jekyll?

Question

<ul class="entries">
  {% for post in paginator.posts %}
  <li>
    <a href="{{ post.url }}">
    <h3>{{ post.title }}</h3>
    <p class="blogdate">{{ post.date | date: "%d %B %Y" }}</p>
    <div>{{ post.content |truncatehtml | truncatewords: 60 }}</div>
    </a>
  </li>
  {% endfor %}
</ul>

That shows all my posts, I just want to show the most recent.

Galenic

Answer 1

This can be accomplished through the use of limit:

{% for post in site.posts limit:1 %}
... Show the post ...
{% endfor %}

You can also use limit and offset together to "feature" your most recent post:

<h1>Latest Post</h1>
{% for post in site.posts limit:1 %}
... Show the first post all big ...
{% endfor %}
<h1>Recent Posts</h1>
{% for post in site.posts offset:1 limit:2 %}
... Show the next two posts ...
{% endfor %}

Dorina

This really helped me, thanks. However in the first example i had to put a value for offset otherwise the first post wouldn't show up. Like: {% for post in site.posts offset:1 limit:1 %}. Maybe it changed in the recent versions of Jekyll. – Wauters

Christian are you iterating through paginator or site to get your posts? Maybe the paginator is 1-indexed or something. – Dorina

No, sorry. I was exactly using: {% for post in site.posts limit:1 %} – Wauters

Must be a version change then. Actually that makes sense given the big update Jekyll had during 2013. I'll dink around and update this answer.. – Dorina

Side note, for accessibility reasons you only want one <h1> tag per page. Awesome answer tho, thank you! Very helpful. – Broider

@Broider Perhaps use sectioning tags then use H2 as a higher-level sub-topic of the outline. – Exalt

Answer 2

Rather than create a loop, just assign the variable and move on...

{% assign post = site.posts.first %}

(Edit 2018) Since someone wanted to know how to iterate other posts after you've done this:

{% for post in site.posts offset:1 %}
  ... Show the next posts ...
{% endfor %}

Parochial

This works if you only want to show one post, but it interferes with being able to list the rest of the posts on the same page. – Aphonia

The question asked was "I want to show only one post," and my response answers it. If you later want to show other posts, then you create a loop of the site.posts offsetting by one. This lets you start on post #2. The other answer shows the offset, in case you're not familiar. – Parochial

Answer 3

If you got here for the question as stated in the title, "How can I show just the most recent post on my home page with jekyll?" and not "how do I show only the latest post in my template," the following might be helpful.

Given a brand new Jekyll version 3.7.3 install with the default minima theme, create a file, _layouts/home.html with the following content:

---
layout: none
---
{{ site.posts.first }}

Causes Jekyll 3.7.3 to show the first post, using the post template, as the home page.

Windowlight

This should be layout: null, not none. – Goodfellowship

This is the best solution for me because it seems to preserve things like page.url and other variables that get lost in the other solutions. This means you can use the same layout page as your other post pages. – Agger

Answer 4

It appears you can also just access the latest post via the first index of site.posts as in:

{%- assign latest_post = site.posts[0] -%}

Latest post: <a href="{{ latest_post.url }}">{{ latest_post.title }}</a>

While site.posts.first works too as mentioned by someone else, the above example also provides a consistent manner for accessing other indices besides just the first (not that you would ever need to). Also, I didn't have enough reputation to add this answer as a comment instead :)

Bandwidth