How to copy subdirectories as-is in a Jekyll site

Question

I have a website; some pages I maintain manually, some others, I generate using tools (mostly Shinx). For manually maintained pages, I'd like to migrate to Jekyll.

So my idea was to copy my whole website in a jekyll project, and progressively move pages from static HTML files to jekyll-managed markdown files, much easier to maintain. Generated pages, on the other hand, would be copied untouched.

It works pretty well... except that Jekyll does not copy the files starting with an underscore, which I have quite a lot: Sphinx names some special directories with a leading underscore (_static, _modules...), and I publish some python code, in which leading underscore are also used (e.g. __init__.py).

I know I could use the include directive in _config.yml, and add one by one all known files/directories that I want to keep. But I would still risk to miss some files (especially when my generators evolve).

I would rather be able to tell Jekyll, for each generated subdirectory, "this directory should be copied as-is". This would prevent it to look at every file in it to see if it should be processed, and so any file, starting with an underscore or not, would be blindly copied.

Is there a way to do that? I could not find any...

Answer 1

The strategy I use (and, I assume, the strategy intended by the jekyll developers) is to have the generation tool (sphinx, yard, ...) generate directly into the output directory (e.g. _site/api) and add the resulting folder to the keep_files configuration option in _config.yml