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★ 17.3k Star Eleventy on GitHub! This is an easy way to support our underrated project and help boost our rank on both GitHub and jamstack.org’s list of site generators.

Eleventy v3.0.0 requires Node.js version 18 or higher.

You can check whether or not you have Node installed by running node --version in a terminal application. (Well, wait—what is a Terminal?) If the command is not found or it reports a number lower than 18, you will need to download and install Node.js before moving on to the next step.

Prefer to watch videos instead? Check out 6 minutes to Build a Blog from Scratch.

Step 1 Make a Project Directory

Create a directory for your project using the mkdir command (short for make directory):

mkdir eleventy-sample

Now move into that directory with the cd command (short for change directory):

cd eleventy-sample

Step 2 Install Eleventy

Create a `package.json`

Installing Eleventy into a project requires a package.json file.

npm pnpm Yarn

npm init -y

The npm command (included with Node.js) will create a package.json file for you with npm init -y. The -y flag tells npm to use default values and skips the questionnaire.

Use the following command if you want to use ESM in your project and not CommonJS.

npm pkg set type="module"

pnpm init

Learn more about pnpm (it requires separate installation).

yarn init

Learn more about yarn (it requires separate installation).

Install Eleventy

@11ty/eleventy is published on npm and we can install and save it into our project’s package.json by running:

npm pnpm Yarn

npm install @11ty/eleventy

pnpm install @11ty/eleventy

yarn add @11ty/eleventy

You may also install Eleventy globally but the package.json installation method above is recommended.

Step 3 Run Eleventy

npm pnpm Yarn

npx @11ty/eleventy

We can use the npx command (also provided by Node.js) to run our local project's version of Eleventy.

pnpm exec eleventy

yarn exec eleventy

Here’s what your command line might look like after you run Eleventy:

[11ty] Wrote 0 files in 0.03 seconds (v3.0.0)

If you see (v3.0.0) in your output you know you’re using the newest version. However, Eleventy didn’t process any files! This is expected—we have an empty folder with no templates inside.

Step 4 Create some templates

A template is a content file written in a format such as Markdown, HTML, Liquid, Nunjucks, and more, which Eleventy transforms into a page (or pages) when building our site.

Let’s run two commands to create two new template files.

macOS Linux Windows Cross Platform

echo '<!doctype html><title>Page title</title><p>Hi</p>' > index.html
echo '# Heading' > README.md

echo '<!doctype html><title>Page title</title><p>Hi</p>' | out-file -encoding utf8 'index.html'
echo '# Heading' | out-file -encoding utf8 'README.md'

If the out-file command is not available in your Windows Terminal window (it’s PowerShell specific), use the Cross Platform method instead.

npx @11ty/create index.html "<!doctype html><title>Page title</title><p>Hi</p>"
npx @11ty/create README.md "# Heading"

Learn more about @11ty/create (requires Node.js 18 or newer).

Alternatively, you can create these using any text editor—just make sure you save them into your project folder and they have the correct file extensions.

After you’ve created an HTML template and a Markdown template, let’s run Eleventy again with the following command:

npm pnpm Yarn

npx @11ty/eleventy

pnpm exec eleventy

yarn exec eleventy

The output might look like this:

[11ty] Writing _site/README/index.html from ./README.md (liquid)
[11ty] Writing _site/index.html from ./index.html (liquid)
[11ty] Wrote 2 files in 0.04 seconds (v3.0.0)

We’ve compiled our two content templates in the current directory into the output folder (_site is the default).

Step 5 Gaze upon your templates

Use --serve to start up a hot-reloading local web server.

npm pnpm Yarn

npx @11ty/eleventy --serve

pnpm exec eleventy --serve

yarn exec eleventy -- --serve

Your command line might look something like:

[11ty] Writing _site/index.html from ./index.html (liquid)
[11ty] Writing _site/README/index.html from ./README.md (liquid)
[11ty] Wrote 2 files in 0.04 seconds (v3.0.0)
[11ty] Watching…
[11ty] Server at http://localhost:8080/

Open http://localhost:8080/ or http://localhost:8080/README/ in your favorite web browser to see your Eleventy site live! When you save your template files—Eleventy will refresh the browser with your new changes automatically!

Step 6 Put it online (optional)

Head over to our deployment documentation to read more about putting your Eleventy project online for everyone to see.

Step 7 Continue Learning…

Congratulations—you made something with Eleventy! Now put it to work:

Add more content! In the above tutorial we used HTML and Markdown. Why not JavaScript or WebC (for components) next? Nunjucks and Liquid are also very popular. Maybe you’re feeling super adventurous and want to add your own custom type?.
Use a layout file so that you don’t have to repeat boilerplate on every template.
Add a configuration file to unlock advanced Eleventy capabilities!
Add CSS, JavaScript, or Web Fonts to your project.
Learn more of the command line options for Eleventy.
Perhaps you’d like to consume data from third party APIs in your project?

Tutorials and Starter Projects

For folks wanting to build a blog, you can learn how to start from scratch (learn how it works) or use our official Blog starter project (get up and running faster):

Screenshot of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzf9A9tkkl4

6 Minutes to Build a Blog from Scratch with Eleventy (2023) ⏱ 6m

Screenshot of https://github.com/11ty/eleventy-base-blog

eleventy-base-blog (Official Starter Project)

Screenshot of https://www.filamentgroup.com/lab/build-a-blog/

Build your own Blog from Scratch using Eleventy (2018)

You can also use one of the many Starter Projects or read some of our excellent Community-contributed Tutorials (a curated few of which are included below):