Syntax highlighting markdown code blocks in Jekyll (without using liquid tags)

Question

It seems like syntax highlighting in Jekyll is limited to using liquid tags and pygments like so:

{% highlight bash %}
cd ~
{% endhighlight %}

Answer 1

In latest jekyll support code blocks, but if you use older version, you need to hack.

How about below? Try to add below's file as your _plugin/triple-backtick.rb

module Jekyll
  class MarkdownConverter
    alias :old_convert :convert
    def convert(content)
      content.gsub!(/(?:^|\n)```(\w*)\n(.*\n)```\n/m) do |text|
        cls = $1.empty? ? "prettyprint" : "prettyprint lang-#{$1}"
        "<pre class=\"#{cls}\"><code>#{$2}</code></pre>"
      end
      old_convert(content)
    end
  end
end

Answer 2

I ended up switching to kramdown to parse markdown which comes with coderay for syntax highlighting. This has the benefit of being a pure ruby solution which works on heroku.

Answer 3

I've described 2 alternative solutions to adding properly formatted code snippets to your Jekyll driven site. http://demisx.github.io/jekyll/2014/01/13/improve-code-highlighting-in-jekyll.html. They do not rely on 3-rd party plugins and compatible with free GitHub Pages hosting.