Eleventy: Simple static site generator that transforms a directory of templates into HTML

Eleventy: Simple static site generator that transforms a directory of templates into HTML

Eleventy is a self-hosted blog and content management tool. Simple static site generator that transforms a directory of templates into HTML.

Why self-host Eleventy

Self-hosting Eleventy removes the dependency on a third-party service. For anyone who values data ownership, that matters more than convenience in the long run.

What it does

Eleventy falls into the Blog, Content Management, Static Site category of self-hosted software. It is designed to be deployed on your own infrastructure, whether that is a home server, a VPS, or a local machine running Docker.

Community traction

The project has 17k stars on GitHub, which is a reasonable proxy for how widely it is used. Active repositories tend to ship bug fixes faster and have better documentation than projects that stall after the initial release.

Deployment

Docker is the most common deployment path. If you are already running containers at home, adding Eleventy to a compose file is a low-friction way to try it.

Alternatives

If Eleventy does not fit your needs, common alternatives include Medium. The self-hosted versions of these tools often differ in resource requirements and feature focus, so it is worth testing the one that matches your workload.

Maturity

The current release is 2.0.1. The project has moved past early development and tends to ship stable, documented releases.

License

It is licensed under MIT, making it freely available for personal and commercial use.

If the use case fits, Eleventy is a solid choice. Most of the complexity is in the initial deploy, and the day-to-day operation is low maintenance.