While creating this site I wanted to mount the blog files under blog/, but still have the home page be the first page of posts. Getting the first page of posts on the home page was no problem. Due to the way that Jekyll does its pagination though, getting the actual pagination links to show up was a different story.

When the Jekyll generator runs to create the blog pages, the pager is only in existence for the creation of those pages. It does not stay scoped to the site data or anything like that.

To accomplish what I wanted, which was to have pagination outside of the generated blog pages I faked a pager using a filter.

def fake_pager(site, posts)
  class << site
    def config; self; end
  end
  Pager.new site, 1, posts
end

Then in /index.html just assign the pager and call the pagination include and use pager instead of paginator.

{%assign pager = site | fake_pager: site.posts %}
{%include pagination.html %}