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Deployment

Contents

Now that you’ve built a web site with Eleventy (even if it’s one HTML page!) you might be ready to put it on the web for everyone to see! There are a bunch of different ways to do it!

A standard Eleventy build (e.g. running npx @11ty/eleventy) is a production-ready build by default. Eleventy doesn’t change its build behavior internally for development versus production.

If you want to customize Eleventy to do your own local development/production optimizations, environment variables are a common solution to accomplish that goal.

Providers

Take a look at the list below for some ideas on where to deploy your Eleventy project. There are many deployment options available and this is not meant to be an exhaustive list.

Jamstack Providers

Jamstack providers can trigger your Eleventy build command automatically when you commit a file to your source control repository (GitHub, GitLab, Codeberg, etc.) and deploy Eleventy’s build output directory for you.

Use an npm Script

One common practice when deploying Eleventy via a Jamstack provider is to use an npm script to run your build command. This is configured in your package.json file and could look like this:

Filename package.json
{
"scripts": {
"build": "npx @11ty/eleventy"
}
}

This allows you to configure your host to run npm run build and allows you to make future changes to that command in your code and not the host’s configuration.

Classic Web Hosts

Eleventy can work with any web host that supports static files!

With these hosts deployment is not automatically triggered for you, so after you run the Eleventy build command you’ll need to upload your Eleventy output directory (defaults to _site) to the host manually.

This is a great place to start if you’re not familiar with source control (e.g. git or GitHub).

Edit on the Web

There are some great Web editors popping up that you can use to run and edit Eleventy projects online! Here are some options:

Persisting Cache

The .cache folder is used by the Eleventy Fetch plugin (and Eleventy Image) to avoid repeating costly network requests. On your hosting provider’s build server, this folder will typically be empty when you start a build, because you definitely are not checking in your .cache folder to git (right?).

Some Jamstack providers have additional features to persist this folder between builds, re-useing the cache and speeding up build times. Here are a few of these:

Speed up Eleventy Image

Additionally, if you’re writing your Eleventy Image output to your Eleventy output directory (e.g. ./_site/img/) (and not checking those files into git), you can persist this folder as well to reuse the Eleventy Image disk cache to improve build times.

Mini-Tutorials

Deploy an Eleventy project to GitHub pages

Includes persisted cache across builds. Using peaceiris/actions-gh-pages.

  1. Go to your repository’s Settings on GitHub.
  2. In the GitHub Pages section change:
    • Source: Deploy from a branch
    • Branch: gh-pages/(root)
  3. Create a new GitHub workflow file in
    .github/workflows/deploy-to-ghpages.yml
    name: Deploy to GitHub Pages

    on:
    push:
    branches:
    - main
    pull_request:

    jobs:
    deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-22.04
    permissions:
    contents: write
    concurrency:
    group: ${{ github.workflow }}-${{ github.ref }}
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v3

    - name: Setup Node
    uses: actions/setup-node@v3
    with:
    node-version: "18"

    - name: Persist npm cache
    uses: actions/cache@v3
    with:
    path: ~/.npm
    key: ${{ runner.os }}-node-${{ hashFiles('**/package.json') }}

    - name: Persist Eleventy .cache
    uses: actions/cache@v3
    with:
    path: ./.cache
    key: ${{ runner.os }}-eleventy-fetch-cache

    - run: npm install
    - run: npm run build-ghpages

    - name: Deploy
    uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3
    if: github.ref == 'refs/heads/main'
    with:
    github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
    publish_dir: ./_site

Using netlify-plugin-cache to persist cache

Using netlify-plugin-cache.

  1. npm install netlify-plugin-cache
  2. Add the following to your
    netlify.toml configuration file
    [[plugins]]
    package = "netlify-plugin-cache"

    [plugins.inputs]
    paths = [ ".cache" ]

From the Community

Γ—70 resources courtesy of 11tybundle.dev curated by IndieWeb Avatar for https://www.bobmonsour.com/Bob Monsour

Expand to see 65 more resources.

Other pages in Eleventy Projects: