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Incremental Builds

Incremental builds via the command line flag --incremental perform a partial build operating only on files that have changed to improve build times when doing local development.

Let’s check in on the current capabilities and the roadmap:

  • Templates
    • If you create/update a template file, Eleventy will run the build for that file and only that file.
    • Layouts Added in v2.0.0
      • When you change a layout file, any templates using that layout file are rebuilt.
    • Template Dependencies Added in v2.0.0Any templates using a dependency mapped via the addDependencies method will be rebuilt when those dependencies change.
      • This feature was previously exposed as part of the API for Custom template extensions via the isIncrementalMatch function.
      • Other Includes: If the created/updated file is in your Includes or Layouts directories, a full build will run. Added in v2.0.0Files used as Eleventy Layouts in your build are exempted.
    • Collections Added in v2.0.0
  • Passthrough Copy
    • Incremental passthrough copy uses the following rules:
    • Only copy a passthrough copy file when it actively changed. Don’t run a template build if only a passthrough copy file has changed.
    • If a template has changed, don’t copy the passthrough copy files.
    • There was some discussion about making this behavior default at Issue #1109.
    • Added in v2.0.0 Passthrough copy can be emulated during --serve to speed up both incremental and non-incremental builds.
  • Configuration File
    • If you create/update your Eleventy configuration file, a full build will run.
  • Don’t build on startup: Added in v2.0.0 --ignore-initial was added and works great with --incremental.

Additional Template Language Features

The previously stated incremental features are implemented in Eleventy core and are available to all template languages. Some template types offer additional --incremental build support:

  • WebC: deep knowledge of the full component dependency graph allows us to smartly build templates that use a component when that component is changed.

🗓 To Do

  • Cold Start Incremental: --incremental does a full build to start out to provide a fresh starting point to work from. This feature would save the state of the build to the file system for faster cold starts. Issue #984
  • Incremental on a Build Server: Cache the output folder between builds on a CI server like Netlify and only process/write templates that have changed since the last build. Issue #2775
  • Global/directory/template Data file usage mapped to templates Issue #2706
  • Template types
    • 11ty.js: Map JavaScript dependencies
    • liquid: Dependency mapping for Liquid templates ({% include %}, etc)
    • Dependency mapping for Nunjucks templates ({% include %}, etc) Unlikely due to Nunjucks API limitations.
  • Collections dependencies improvements: while we have eleventyImport.collections to declaratively log collections dependencies, we may be able to dive deeper into template syntax APIs to find the symbols in use. Issue #1615 Alternatively we may be able to change the collections API to use Proxies to get smarter about this in an easier way (though previous experiments with this for eleventyComputed failed in some languages).
  • Render plugin: {% renderFile %} dependencies
  • Stretch goal: Pagination-level incremental that operates on a subset of data Issue #1087