Book Image

Eleventy By Example

By : Bryan Robinson
Book Image

Eleventy By Example

By: Bryan Robinson

Overview of this book

11ty is the dark horse of the Jamstack world, offering unparalleled flexibility and performance that gives it an edge against other static site generators such as Jekyll and Hugo. With it, developers can leverage the complete Node ecosystem and create blazing-fast, static-first websites that can be deployed from a content delivery network or a simple server. This book will teach you how to set up, customize, and make the most of 11ty in no time. Eleventy by Example helps you uncover everything you need to create your first 11ty website before diving into making more complex sites and extending 11ty’s base functionality with custom short codes, plugins, and content types. Over the course of 5 interactive projects, you’ll learn how to build basic websites, blogs, media sites, and static sites that will respond to user input without the need for a server. With these, you’ll learn basic 11ty skills such as templates, collections, and data use, along with advanced skills such as plugin creation, image manipulation, working with a headless CMS, and the use of the powerful 11ty Serverless plugin. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-equipped to leverage the capabilities of 11ty by implementing best practices and reusable techniques that can be applied across multiple projects, reducing the website launch time.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Setting up 11ty to run in a serverless function

Typically, on a static site such as the type 11ty creates, there’s no way to handle any user input. That sort of thing is reserved for when you have server-side code that you can run. We’re using a static site generator on a dedicated static site host. We don’t have access to typical server-side architecture.

Instead, we have serverless functions that we can use. While serverless functions are great for handling data and user input, responding with a full HTML page can be cumbersome. Sending back HTML that is the same as what our static HTML was at build time required a lot of rewriting of HTML into JavaScript template literal strings, or the implementation of bigger template libraries in our functions. This was a problem for maintenance. To deal with this, as of the 1.0 release of 11ty, we now have access to a built-in plugin named 11ty Serverless. This allows 11ty to provide all the templates from our build to...