Intro
By default Hakyll does not add the proper meta tags for Twitter Cards. For that reason, if we try to tweet a link to a Hakyll post, no card will be rendered. We can confirm that by using Twitter's Card Validator:
That can be fixed with a few lines of code:
The Few Lines of Code
As explained in the docs, it's enough to add to the head of the HTML document the following stuff:
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary" />
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@nytimesbits" />
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@nickbilton" />
<meta property="og:url" content="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/08/a-twitter-for-my-sister/" />
<meta property="og:title" content="A Twitter for My Sister" />
<meta property="og:description" content="In the early days, Twitter grew so quickly that it was almost impossible to add new features because engineers spent their time trying to keep the rocket ship from stalling." />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/12/08/technology/bits-newtwitter/bits-newtwitter-tmagArticle.jpg" />
In Hakyll we can add the meta tags to templates/default.html. We just need to make sure to have them only in the post pages. To make that happen, we just check if the description key is present in the context:
$if(description)$
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary" />
<meta name="twitter:site" content="MY_TWITTER_HANDLE" />
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="MY_TWITTER_HANDLE" />
<meta property="og:url" content="$url$" />
<meta property="og:title" content="$title$" />
<meta property="og:description" content="$description$" />
<meta property="og:image" content="$cover_image$" />
$else$
$endif$
And then in each post metadata we need to add description and cover_image:
---
...
description: Some description of my post
cover_image: https://example.com/cover_image
---