unable to build a jekyll site ... invalid date

Question

when trying to build a jekyll site with "jekyll serve" I get this error:

  Generating...
         ERROR: YOUR SITE COULD NOT BE BUILT:
                ------------------------------------
                Invalid date '<%= Time.now.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %z') %>': Document 'vendor/cache/gems/jekyll-3.2.1/lib/site_template/_posts/0000-00-00-welcome-to-jekyll.markdown.erb' does not have a valid date in the YAML front matter.

ruby and jekyll were installed using homebrew on Mac OSX

Answer 1

I found the answer ....

It seems that you need to place the line exclude: [vendor] in _config.yml

found this on the following Github issue: https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/issues/2938