- Canary
4.0.0-alpha.10- Stable
3.1.6- Pro
- Coming Soon
- Guide
Guide
- Get Started
- Command Line Usage
- Add a Configuration File
- Copy Files to Output
- Add CSS, JS, Fonts
- Importing Content
- Configure Templates with Data
- Using Data in Templates
- Template Languages
- Template Features
- Environment Variables
- Internationalization (i18n)
- Watch Files and Dev Servers
- Common Pitfalls
- Advanced
- Plugins
- Services
Build Awesome is a developer tool to help you build fast websites even faster.
- It’s secure and resilient: static websites let you skip the runtime and keep your uptime.
- It’s lightweight: we’ve decreased our dependency count with every major release since 2018.
- It’s scalable: deploy with the most efficient architecture for the modern agent-heavy web.
- It’s stable: stop getting burned upgrading your dependencies. We want your website to deploy without headaches for years to come.
- It’s trusted by folks at
NASA
Cern
TC39
Google
Microsoft
Cloudflare
Mozilla (and more).
You should have a website and Build Awesome can help you create your very own home on the web. Get started!
Are terminal windows and command lines not your thing?
Build Awesome Pro is a new web site builder that will help anyone launch and maintain a web site (no installation or command line required). Visual editing and collaboration, zero lock-in, and you help to fund continued maintenance of the open source project for the entire community.
Quick Start
Build Awesome requires a way to run JavaScript on your computer and we recommend Node.js (version
22 or newer). You can check whether or not you have Node.js installed by running node --version in a Terminal. (Well, wait—what is a Terminal?) If node is not found or it reports a version number below
22, you will need to install Node.js before moving on.
Next create an index.md Markdown file. You can do this in the text editor of your choice (Notepad.exe, TextEdit, Nova, Visual Studio Code, or others).
Now run Build Awesome using npx, an npm-provided command that is bundled with Node.js.
npx @awesome.me/buildawesome --servepnpm dlx @awesome.me/buildawesome --servepnpm is an optional alternative to npm that needs to be installed separately.
yarn dlx @awesome.me/buildawesome --serveYarn is an optional alternative to npm that needs to be installed separately.
Build Awesome compiles any files in the current directory matching valid file extensions (md is one of many) to the _site output folder. It might look like this:
[buildawesome] Writing _site/index.html from ./index.md (liquid)
[buildawesome] Wrote 1 file in 0.03 seconds (v4.0.0-alpha.10)
[buildawesome] Watching…
[buildawesome] Server at http://localhost:8080/
The --serve option also starts a local development server. Open up http://localhost:8080/ in your favorite web browser to view your website.
If you’d like to experiment further with different template syntax, try out the playground below.
- Read our full Get Started guide on the docs.
- Watch 6 minutes to Build a Blog from Scratch.
Try Build Awesome in Your Browser
Now try editing one of the three files in this project. You can make use of Front Matter, Liquid and Markdown template syntax. Change the title in front matter on a blog post and watch the list update on the index page!
---
subject: World
---
# Hello {{ subject }}
You can type here!
- [Markdown](/docs/languages/markdown/)
- [Liquid](/docs/languages/liquid/)
## Posts
{%- for post in collections.posts %}
- [{{ post.data.title }}]({{ post.url}})
{%- endfor %}
_Built with {{ buildawesome.generator }}_---
title: First blog post ⬅️
tags: posts
---
# {{ title }}---
title: Second blog post
tags: posts
---
# {{ title }}News from the Blog
- Back Build Awesome Pro and make it easier to build for the web! (2026 April 28)
- Collaborative Editing as Progressive Enhancement (2026 April 21)
- Eleventy is now Build Awesome (2026 March 03)
- Securely Publishing our Packages to npm (2025 December 03)
- Eleventy v3.1.0 is now available — 11% faster and 22% smaller! (2025 May 13)
- 11ty is joining Font Awesome (2024 September 12)
- …and 70 more on the blog archives.
Why should you use Build Awesome?
-
Build Awesome has fast builds and even faster websites.
Name Building ×4000 Markdown Files Build Awesome 1.93s == 🏁 Astro 22.90s ======================= 🏁 Gatsby 29.05s ============================== 🏁 Next.js 70.65s ======================================================================= 🏁 -
Build Awesome is production ready and trusted by:
W3C
GitHub
Font Awesome
Apache
freeCodeCamp
-
- …and more
- Build Awesome offers full control over your project’s output. We don’t inject our own markup into your pages.
-
Build Awesome has a lovely community of folks that really care about what they build. What is
Lea Verou saying about Build Awesome and Eleventy?
-
Build Awesome and it’s predecessor Eleventy are stable. We’ve shipped 226 releases going back to the first version in December 2017 and only three of those releases have required developer intervention.
a11yproject.com launched with version 1.0.0 of Eleventy. […] It's been a little under three years and I haven't had to make any adjustments to its dependencies, and it can still install and run from a cold start with no complications. When I update the site to use version 2.0.0 I'll actually be removing dependencies, and not adding more. […] That's rare and special.—
Eric Bailey
- Build Awesome doesn’t track you. We don’t have or use telemetry nor require you to opt-out of data collection.
- Build Awesome is zero-config to start and can be extended with flexible configuration options.
- Build Awesome works with multiple template languages. You can pick one or use them all together in a single project:
- Build Awesome uses independent template languages. We don’t want to hold your content hostage with a custom format. If you decide to use a different syntax later, having your content decoupled in this way will make migration easier.
- Build Awesome does not require that you use a JavaScript framework—that means zero client-side JavaScript by default across the board. We’re thinking long-term to opt-out of the framework rat race. The tool chain, modules, and components you use in your front end stack are decoupled from this tool. Work from a solid foundation of pre-rendered templates that suit your project’s progressive enhancement baseline requirements.
-
Build Awesome works with your project’s existing directory structure. The tool doesn’t require an
appdirectory or apagesdirectory. Use the structure that you want. - Build Awesome allows incremental adoption. We only look for the files and directories you specify. Further, with even more precision you can opt-out or ignore specific files in your project. You don’t need to start a Build Awesome project from scratch. Build Awesome is flexible enough to allow conversion of only a few templates at a time. Migrate as fast or as slow as you’d like.
Get started with Build Awesome today! or read more about its predecessor Eleventy’s project goals (from 2018).
Todd and Bruce said this button should be bigger and as you can see they were right.
Built Awesome
A random sample taken from 879 authors. Check out the fastest of their 1271 websites.
Don’t take my word for it
Rainbow
Listen to what these happy developers are saying about Build Awesome and Eleventy:
“Don’t tell Zach I said it but Eleventy is seeming fresh as hell so far” —
Mat Marquis
“I looked into and actively tried using various static site generators for this project. Eleventy was the only one I could find that gave me the fine-grained control I needed at blazingly fast build times.” —
Mathias Bynens
“Eleventy is absolutely wonderful. It’s by far the nicest static site generator I’ve used in what feels like forever.” —
Addy Osmani
“#1 Product of the Day (May 2022)” —
Product Hunt
“Jekyll is dead to me” —
Andy Bell
“I use Eleventy on almost every project at this point and I love it.” —
“Eleventy is a killer static site generator. That’s all.” —
Sara Soueidan
“I heard Eleventy was good” —
Lach Zeatherman
“Eleventy is almost fascinatingly simple.” —
Chris Coyier
“Eleventy + Netlify have become my new workflow for static sites. I think I'm in love.” —
Mina Markham
“2022 winner of the Google Open Source Peer Bonus Award” —
Alternatives
This project aims to directly compete with all other website generators. We encourage you to try out a few others: