Reading and Writing Arrays to Text Files in Ruby

I wanted to be able to schedule publishing new articles here on a regular schedule. One thing I needed was to create a simple mechanism to tell the publisher which posts are upcoming and the order to publish them in.

I opted for a simple text file called publish_queue which sits in the Jekyll _drafts folder, along with the draft posts that are ready to publish and queued up, or under development for future queuing. It will likely be a YAML text file eventually, but a simple file with the name of the draft post on each line seemed a sufficient first solution. So the file looks like:

I read each line of this file into an array where each array item is the name of a post, and call a method to determine which is the next one to publish (currently the first, but later could be some other rule):

Since IO.readlines("_drafts/publish_queue") preserves carriage returns, I call .map(&:chomp) to strip those off the file names.

After I’ve published the file from _drafts to _posts and pushed the changes to the Jekyll repository on GitHub, I need to update the publish queue by calling drafts_to_publish.shift to remove the draft we just published from the publish queue: