A starter repository showing how to build a blog with the Eleventy site generator (using the v3.0 release).
- Make a directory and navigate to it:
mkdir my-blog-name
cd my-blog-name
- Clone this Repository
git clone https://github.com/11ty/eleventy-base-blog.git .
Optional: Review eleventy.config.js
and _data/metadata.js
to configure the site’s options and data.
- Install dependencies
npm install
- Run Eleventy
Generate a production-ready build to the _site
folder:
npx @11ty/eleventy
Or build and host on a local development server:
npx @11ty/eleventy --serve
Or you can run debug mode to see all the internals.
- Using Eleventy v3 with zero-JavaScript output.
- Content is exclusively pre-rendered (this is a static site).
- Can easily deploy to a subfolder without changing any content
- All URLs are decoupled from the content’s location on the file system.
- Configure templates via the Eleventy Data Cascade
- Performance focused: four-hundos Lighthouse score out of the box!
- 0 Cumulative Layout Shift
- 0ms Total Blocking Time
- Local development live reload provided by Eleventy Dev Server.
- Content-driven navigation menu
- Fully automated Image optimization
- Zero-JavaScript output.
- Support for modern image formats automatically (e.g. AVIF and WebP)
- Processes images on-request during
--serve
for speedy local builds. - Prefers
<img>
markup if possible (single image format) but switches automatically to<picture>
for multiple image formats. - Automated
<picture>
syntax markup withsrcset
and optionalsizes
- Includes
width
/height
attributes to avoid content layout shift. - Includes
loading="lazy"
for native lazy loading without JavaScript. - Includes
decoding="async"
- Images can be co-located with blog post files.
- Per page CSS bundles via
eleventy-plugin-bundle
. - Built-in syntax highlighter (zero-JavaScript output).
- Draft content: use
draft: true
to mark any template as a draft. Drafts are only included during--serve
/--watch
and are excluded from full builds. This is driven by theaddPreprocessor
configuration API ineleventy.config.js
. Schema validator will show an error if non-boolean value is set in data cascade. - Blog Posts
- Automated next/previous links
- Accessible deep links to headings
- Generated Pages
- Home, Archive, and About pages.
- Atom feed included (with easy one-line swap to use RSS or JSON
sitemap.xml
- Zero-maintenance tag pages (View on the Demo)
- Content not found (404) page
Deploy this Eleventy site in just a few clicks on these services:
- Read more about Deploying an Eleventy project to the web.
- Deploy this to Netlify
- Deploy this to Vercel
- Look in
.github/workflows/gh-pages.yml.sample
for information on Deploying to GitHub Pages. - Try it out on Stackblitz
content/about/index.md
is an example of a content page.content/blog/
has the blog posts but really they can live in any directory. They need only theposts
tag to be included in the blog posts collection.- Use the
eleventyNavigation
key (via the Eleventy Navigation plugin) in your front matter to add a template to the top level site navigation. This is in use oncontent/index.njk
andcontent/about/index.md
. - Content can be in any template format (blog posts needn’t exclusively be markdown, for example). Configure your project’s supported templates in
eleventy.config.js
->templateFormats
. - The
public
folder in your input directory will be copied to the output folder (viaaddPassthroughCopy
in theeleventy.config.js
file). This means./public/css/*
will live at./_site/css/*
after your build completes. - This project uses three Eleventy Layouts:
_includes/layouts/base.njk
: the top level HTML structure_includes/layouts/home.njk
: the home page template (wrapped intobase.njk
)_includes/layouts/post.njk
: the blog post template (wrapped intobase.njk
)
_includes/postslist.njk
is a Nunjucks include and is a reusable component used to display a list of all the posts.content/index.njk
has an example of how to use it.
If your site enforces a Content Security Policy (as public-facing sites should), you have a few choices (pick one):
- In
base.njk
, remove<style>{% getBundle "css" %}</style>
and uncomment<link rel="stylesheet" href="{% getBundleFileUrl "css" %}">
- Configure the server with the CSP directive
style-src: 'unsafe-inline'
(less secure).