Jekyll: Goodbye ‘site.GH_ENV’

This code has been a great friend for some time now. Based on git history, I added this six years ago and didn’t touch it again.

{% if site.GH_ENV == ‘gh_pages’ %}
    # Analytics code
{% endif %}

What this does, or better say what it should do, is to check if we are in a production environment - aka Github Pages - and print Google analytics code. Of course, I have no idea where I found this, but it stopped working two months ago.

A few days ago, I saw a warning in the Google Analytics console, a place I don’t hang out much. The message was Property codegazerants.com is not receiving hits.

I disregarded it at first, but then I thought it was worth checking out my code.

After doing some “view source” on production, I saw that there was no GA script. 🤷 My beautiful condition just stopped working.

I searched about the GH_ENV key and found two or three Github issues from 2014 and 2018, but that was it. Undocumented configuration. That’s the spirit!

Of course, as a responsible engineer, I then went through the proper channels (it’s called documentation) and found that the same thing could be achieved with

{% if jekyll.environment == 'production' %}
    # Analytics code
{% endif %}

What are the key takeaways here?

Using undocumented, internal parts of libraries, is a bad practice.

Especially in a work environment, that can result to money loss because someone changed their library.

It’s not worth it, trying to understand what went wrong six months from now.

See you again in 2028, dear configuration variable!