How To Build a Static Blog with 11ty

Ever wondered what powers a beautiful blog? It's a static site generator (SSG) called , which is super simple to get started with.But the main reason for me to use Eleventy (11ty) is that it's so blazing fast and customizable.Yes I've tried some others like , but somehow 11ty was so much easier for me (opinion yes 🤫)Let's dive into creating a simple blog with Eleventy! 🔥

Setting up the project

Like other articles like  about setting up node.js, we start by creating a basic folder structure.This will create a directory called blog and change our directory into it.This will install a basic node application.This will add Eleventy to our package, according to their docs a local installation is preferred over a global one.That's it; We can now start working on adding some pages.

Adding a homepage to Eleventy

Of course, every website/blog needs a homepage, so let's start with opening the project in your favorite editor.

First, we will add a file in our root called index.njk

njk is short for  which is a templating language

As you can see, it's a mix between Markdown and Layout.

We define a layout for this file up top layouts/home.njk which we will create in a bit.

Now let's create out layout structure

Create a folder called 

_includes

 in that we create another folder layouts

First we create our base layout, create a file called base.njk

And our home.njk file

Running Eleventy localTo see what we create so far run the following command in your terminalThe open up  to see what we got!Nothing fancy, but it should show an H1 with the text Latest posts will come here.

Adding blog functionality to Eleventy

A blog wouldn't be much without actual blog posts, so let's dive into creating some blog posts.Start by creating a new folder in your root called posts we will then add 5 Markdown files.Follow through these until you have 5, let's call them post-one.md.The important part here is the tags option, we can have multiple tags, but in this case we set one being posts this will become our collection!

Also we mention a new layout here so lets create _includes/layouts/post.njk

Nothing fancy, we extend the base template again and add an essential back to home button.Then we show the Title of this blog post and the content.

No, let's go back to our index.njk file and change it to the following:

Like mentioned in the post files we included a tag called posts and here we are getting those collections called posts!

You can also use collections.all to get ALL collections.

Now let's make the actual postlist.njk

Here we loop through our postlist and make a url to that specific post.Now run the following command again:Yes!We now have our working blog, Let's work from here and make it more awesome!You can find this project on .See how we can .

Previously published at //daily-dev-tips.com/posts/building-a-static-blog-with-11ty/