Eleventy (abbreviated 11ty) is a

static site generator Static site generators (SSGs) are Software engine, software engines that use text input files (such as Markdown, reStructuredText, AsciiDoc and JSON) to generate static web pages. Unlike dynamic websites, these static pages do not change based on t ...

, a software system for creating websites. It is

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

software written in

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

. 11ty is noted for its simplicity, and for its support of a large number of template languages. Paired with other technologies, 11ty can be used as part of a Jamstack. 11ty was created in 2017 by Zach Leatherman. It was inspired by Jekyll.

Purpose

Like all static site generators, the purpose of Eleventy is to allow the user to create

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

documents more simply than by typing out the documents by hand. This is of particular value for multi-page static websites, which require making the same change to many HTML documents. Eleventy uses a "static first" design philosophy, meaning that it specializes in creating HTML documents that do not need to be refreshed or updated each time they are viewed by a web browser. Although Eleventy may be configured to run on web servers at request time creating dynamic web pages this is not its primary purpose.

History

Eleventy was created by Zach Leatherman, a web developer in

Omaha, Nebraska Omaha ( ) is the List of cities in Nebraska, most populous city in the U.S. state of Nebraska. It is located in the Midwestern United States along the Missouri River, about north of the mouth of the Platte River. The nation's List of United S ...

, in 2017. Leatherman was inspired by Jekyll, which is written in the

Ruby Ruby is a pinkish-red-to-blood-red-colored gemstone, a variety of the mineral corundum ( aluminium oxide). Ruby is one of the most popular traditional jewelry gems and is very durable. Other varieties of gem-quality corundum are called sapph ...

language, to create a similar system in the

language. Leatherman says he derived the name "Eleventy" from a story told to him, by his grandmother, about his own childhood mispronunciation of the number eleven. Among the users of 11ty is the

US federal government The Federal Government of the United States of America (U.S. federal government or U.S. government) is the national government of the United States. The U.S. federal government is composed of three distinct branches: legislative, execut ...

via Cloud.gov and the US Web Design System. 11ty is distributed under the

MIT License The MIT License is a permissive software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts very few restrictions on reuse and therefore has high license compatibility. Unl ...

. Version 3.0.0 of 11ty was released in October, 2024.

Features

11ty comes with more than 10 templating engines. These may be used separately or together, giving 11ty flexibility to combine content from several sources or authors. Template languages supported include

Markdown Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber created Markdown in 2004 as an easy-to-read markup language. Markdown is widely used for blogging and instant messaging, and also used ...

, Liquid, Nunjucks and

HAML Haml (HTML Abstraction Markup Language) is a templating system that is designed to avoid writing inline code in a web document and make the HTML cleaner. Similar to other template systems like eRuby, Haml also embeds some code that gets execut ...

. No front-end JavaScript framework is assumed by 11ty; it is "frontend agnostic." By combining 11ty with a JavaScript framework performing API integration, developers may form a Jamstack application. Eleventy includes a local web server for use during development, activated with the --serve flag. It "hot-reloads" upon file changes, updating the web browser as the developer works. Eleventy also has many plugins available, taking advantage of the huge JavaScript ecosystem, there are plugins such as using Sass, helping with navigation, and a mini dev server.

References

{{reflist Blog software Free software programmed in JavaScript Free static website generators Software using the MIT license