11ty / eleventy-base-blog

A starter repository for a blog web site using the Eleventy static site generator.

eleventy-base-blog v8

A starter repository showing how to build a blog with the Eleventy site generator (using the v2.0 release).

Getting Started

• Want a more generic/detailed getting started guide?

1. Make a directory and navigate to it:

mkdir my-blog-name
cd my-blog-name

2. 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.

3. Install dependencies

npm install

4. 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.

Features

• Using Eleventy v2.0 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!
  • View the Lighthouse report for the latest build courtesy of the Netlify Lighthouse plugin.
  • 0 Cumulative Layout Shift
  • 0ms Total Blocking Time
• Local development live reload provided by Eleventy Dev Server.
• Content-driven navigation menu
• Image optimization via the {% image %} shortcode.
  • Zero-JavaScript output.
  • Support for modern image formats automatically (e.g. AVIF and WebP)
  • Prefers <img> markup if possible (single image format) but switches automatically to <picture> for multiple image formats.
  • Automated <picture> syntax markup with srcset and optional sizes
  • 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.
  • View the Image plugin source code
• Per page CSS bundles via eleventy-plugin-bundle.
• Built-in syntax highlighter (zero-JavaScript output).
• Blog Posts
  • Draft posts: use draft: true to mark a blog post as a draft. Drafts are only included during --serve/--watch and are excluded from full builds. View the Drafts plugin source code.
  • Automated next/previous links
  • Accessible deep links to headings
• Generated Pages
  • Home, Archive, and About pages.
  • Feeds for Atom and JSON
  • sitemap.xml
  • Zero-maintenance tag pages (View on the Demo)
  • Content not found (404) page

Demos

• Netlify
• GitHub Pages
• Remix on Glitch
• Cloudflare Pages

Deploy this to your own site

Deploy this Eleventy site in just a few clicks on these services:

• 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
• If you run Eleventy locally you can drag your _site folder to drop.netlify.com to upload it without using git.
• Read more about Deploying an Eleventy project to the web.

Implementation Notes

• 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 the posts 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 on content/index.njk and content/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 (via addPassthroughCopy in the eleventy.config.js file). This means ./public/css/* will live at ./_site/css/* after your build completes.
• Provides two content feeds:
  • content/feed/feed.njk
  • content/feed/json.njk
• This project uses three Eleventy Layouts:
  • _includes/layouts/base.njk: the top level HTML structure
  • _includes/layouts/home.njk: the home page template (wrapped into base.njk)
  • _includes/layouts/post.njk: the blog post template (wrapped into base.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.

Content Security Policy

If your site enforces a Content Security Policy (as public-facing sites should), you have a few choices (pick one):

1. In base.njk, remove <style>{% getBundle "css" %}</style> and uncomment <link rel="stylesheet" href="{% getBundleFileUrl "css" %}">
2. Configure the server with the CSP directive style-src: 'unsafe-inline' (less secure).