Collections

Remote Collections

In addition to using Markdown or Blade files for your collection items, you can return collection items directly from the collections array in config.php. This allows you to generate items programmatically—for example, you can fetch items from a remote source such as an external API or API-based content management systems like Contentful, GraphCMS, or DatoCMS.


Building collection items in config.php

For any collection, items can be built by returning an array or collection of items from the collection's configuration array in config.php. Each item should be an array; the keys of the item will be converted to page variables (such as those that would typically appear in the YAML header of a Markdown file), while the value of the content key will serve as the content of the collection item. This content will be parsed as Markdown, and thus can contain either Markdown or HTML content; it will be available within your Blade templates with @yield('content') or by echoing {!! $page->getContent() !!}:

config.php

1return [
2 'collections' => [
3 'posts' => [
4 'extends' => '_layouts.post',
5 'items' => [
6 [
7 'title' => 'Title of my first post',
8 'content' => '## The first post content',
9 ],
10 [
11 'title' => 'Title of my second post',
12 'content' => '## The second post content',
13 ],
14 ],
15 ],
16 ],
17];

_layouts/post.blade.php

1@extends('_layouts.master')
2 
3@section('body')
4 <h1>{{ $page->title }}</h1>
5 
6 @yield('content')
7@endsection

Under the hood, Jigsaw will:

  1. Create a _tmp directory in the collection's directory (e.g. source/_posts/_tmp) to store temporary Markdown files for each remote collection item
  2. Process the temporary files as though they were *.blade.md files
  3. Remove the temporary files when jigsaw build is complete

In addition to content, each item can specify a filename key, which will be used as the name of the temporary Markdown file. If omitted, the filename will default to the name of the collection followed by an index, so post-1.blade.md, post-2.blade.md, etc. The resulting path of the output file will be processed according to the normal rules for collections.

Alternatively, the items array can contain simple string values, which will be treated as the item's Markdown content, with no page variables:

config.php

1return [
2 'collections' => [
3 'posts' => [
4 'extends' => '_layouts.post',
5 'items' => [
6 '## The content for post 1',
7 '## The content for post 2',
8 '## The content for post 3',
9 ],
10 ],
11 ],
12];

Fetching collection items from a remote API

The items key in config.php can also reference a closure that returns an array or collection of items. By using a closure, collection items can be fetched from anywhere—from a remote API, from other places on the filesystem, or built up programmatically. The resulting data can then be transformed before collection items are built. For example:

config.php

1return [
2 'collections' => [
3 'posts' => [
4 'extends' => '_layouts.post',
5 'items' => function ($config) {
6 $posts = json_decode(file_get_contents('https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts'));
7 
8 return collect($posts)->map(function ($post) {
9 return [
10 'title' => $post->title,
11 'content' => $post->body,
12 ];
13 });
14 },
15 ],
16 ],
17];

If you want the remote API to only be called when building for particular environments, you can place the items closure in the appropriate config.{environment}.php file. For example, to only access your remote API when running build production, create a config.production.php file and include your items closure there. This will prevent potentially long build times while running build local in development.

The items closure receives the config array as a parameter, so you may also reference other config values (for example, an API URL) inside the closure.