UPDATE: September 2026
This series has been updated to more newer version. It was merely authored years ago.
In this article, I said that we will be doing a complete tutorial of Eleventy - from scratch to deployment. Before we get into that, let's talk a bit more about Eleventy.
How Eleventy Works
Eleventy aims to ship as little javascript as possible. It does this by rendering your source files into html and serving those static files.
Templates
Templates is the way you create your various pages in Eleventy. It supports over 3 template languages. Some of them notably:
html
markdown
liquid
nunjucks
What this means is that you have several options to how you choose to author your site. In this tutorial, we will be using markdown and nunjucks for our templates.
Requirements
At this stage, you'll need only 3 things:
Node
A text editor
Willingness to learn p
Make sure you have node installed , then continue with this tutorial
Setup
Create an empty folder anywhere on your computer and navigate into it
mkdir learneleventy
cd learneleventyInitialise an empty
package.jsonfile with
pnpm initInstall eleventy
pnpm install @11ty/eleventyConfigure Project
By default Eleventy uses files your project root to generate your site - you could place all your files there and it would work. I prefer a more ordered approach - having an src folder. Luckily for us Eleventy allows us to modify the path where it looks for source files
In your project root, create a file called eleventy.config.js and place this in it:
exprort default function (eleventyConfig) {
return {
dir: {
input: "src",
data: "_data",
includes: "_includes",
layouts: "_layouts",
},
};
};This is our configuration file for our project. In it we define how we want a our project to behave. For now:
We have set our input directory to
srcOur includes folder to
_includes- Eleventy will look for this folderOur layouts folder to
_layoutsWe will talk about the data folder later
With that done, we make an src in our root and that's where our files will go. Let's make two more folders in src that we will use later: _layouts and _includes
Let's make a index.md file in the root of our src and lets put some dummy content
# My Eleventy Site
I am a site made with EleventyRunning Our Project
To run our site, type this command in your terminal
pnpm exec eleventyYour site will be running in development on http://localhost:8080/. You will also notice that a _site folder has been generated, this is where our rendered files will go.
We don't want to always have to write this when we run our project, so let's add a script in package.json
"scripts": {
"dev": "exec eleventy --serve",
},Gotcha
If we were to change anything in our index.md, those changes would not show unless reloaded the page. Eleventy requires a valid html document structure to facilitate that.
Your First Template
Let's now implement templates in our Eleventy project. In src/_layouts make a file called base.njk
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8" />
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />
<title>My Eleventy Site</title>
</head>
<body>
{{content | safe}}
</body>
</html>As you can see it's just an html document. The thing that's different is {{content | safe}}. This is where any content wrapped by our base will go.
The | safe part is a filter that tells Eleventy that the content is safe to render.
Then modify index to look like this:
---
layout: base
---
# My Eleventy Site
I am a site built with [Eleventy](https://www.11ty.io/).We added YAML frontmatter and specify the layout that is supposed to wrap this file.
Now any changes we make to our source files will automatically update. Also, our page now has a title and doesn't say localhost:8080
NOTE : You can override the template languages in your project if you want to use anything other than markdown and nunjucks.
Using Variables In Templates
Usually each page on a site has a unique title. We have hardcoded the title. Let's improve that so that the page title is applied dynamically.
Modify our base with this
<title>My Eleventy Site - {{title}}</title>Then our index.md YAML with thiis
---
layout: base
title: Home
---Now when we hover over the tab we see My Eleventy Site - Home
Conclusion
Without doing a lot, we have built a website. It may not look nice right now, but it is valid webpage.
Join me in the next part as we add more to this site.
The working repository for this series can be found here: Part 1: Installation
While You wait
Check out the docs: https://www.11ty.dev/docs/
Join the Discord, a lot of helpful people in there
The working repository for this series can be found here: https://github.com/Psypher1/learneleventy
Thank you for reading, let's connect!
Thank you for visiting this little corner of mine. My email and DMs are always open; if you want to chat or collaborate on something, shoot me a email
Where you can get hold of me:
<a hrer="https://discord.com/users/Pharaoh#5441/" target="_blank">Discord</a>
Comments (0)
Join the discussion by logging into your account.