Setting Up Your Website

At its core, Eleventy (11ty) is a simple concept. It takes a group of pages, data, and templates and combines them to create a static output – typically HTML – that can be served on a web server or distributed on a content delivery network (CDN). Tools that do this are typically referred to as static site generators (SSGs).

In this chapter, you’ll learn all you need to know to get your first simple 11ty website completed. In order to do this, we’ll talk a little bit about the history of static sites to uncover what makes 11ty special, as well as how to install and configure it on your computer to get moving in a simple, best-practice-focused structure. Every 11ty concept starts with the concepts in this chapter. This is what we will cover in this chapter:

• What are static site generators and why are they important?
• What is 11ty?
• Running 11ty with no configuration
• Configuring 11ty with basic best practices
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