These docs are for an upcoming version of Build Awesome and are subject to change—take extra care before linking here as URLs may change! Look to the latest stable docs instead (or the full release history).
Now that you’ve built a web site with Eleventy (even if it’s one HTML page!) you might be ready to put it on the web for everyone to see! There are a bunch of different ways to do it!
A standard Eleventy build (e.g. running npx @11ty/eleventy) is a production-ready build by default. Eleventy doesn’t change its build behavior internally for development versus production.
If you want to customize Eleventy to do your own local development/production optimizations, environment variables are a common solution to accomplish that goal.
Providers
Take a look at the list below for some ideas on where to deploy your Eleventy project. There are many deployment options available and this is not meant to be an exhaustive list.
Jamstack Providers
Jamstack providers can trigger your Eleventy build command automatically when you commit a file to your source control repository (GitHub, GitLab, Codeberg, etc.) and deploy Eleventy’s build output directory for you.
Git-based deployment platform that runs your Eleventy build on its servers and transfers the <code>_site/</code> output to your own server via SSH/SFTP/FTP (or to S3, Azure Blob, or Rackspace Cloud Files). Supports multiple environments with branch-to-server mapping, config-file injection, atomic releases, one-click rollback, and pre/post deploy hooks.
One common practice when deploying Eleventy via a Jamstack provider is to use an npm script to run your build command. This is configured in your package.json file and could look like this:
Filename package.json
{"scripts":{"build":"npx @11ty/eleventy"}}
This allows you to configure your host to run npm run build and allows you to make future changes to that command in your code and not the host’s configuration.
Classic Web Hosts
Eleventy can work with any web host that supports static files!
With these hosts deployment is not automatically triggered for you, so after you run the Eleventy build command you’ll need to upload your Eleventy output directory (defaults to _site) to the host manually.
This is a great place to start if you’re not familiar with source control (e.g. git or GitHub).
Some Jamstack providers have additional features to persist this folder between builds, re-useing the cache and speeding up build times. Here are a few of these:
Cloudflare Pages: now preserves the .cache folder by default! (shipped April 2024)
Additionally, if you’re writing your Eleventy Image output to your Eleventy output directory (e.g. ./_site/img/) (and not checking those files into git), you can persist this folder as well to reuse the Eleventy Image disk cache to improve build times.
Go to your repository’s Settings on GitHub and find the GitHub Pages subsection. Under the Build and Deployment on the GitHub Pages settings, find the Source option and select GitHub Actions
In your project’s package.json, make sure the build-ghpages script has the --pathprefix= parameter set to your repository name.
Exception: When using a Custom domain (example.com) with GitHub Pages, deploying to example.com/ instead of *.github.io/YOUR_REPO_NAME/ make sure to remove the --pathprefix parameter entirely. e.g. "build-ghpages": "npx @11ty/eleventy",
Commit this new .github/workflows/deploy-gh-pages.yml file and push it upstream to GitHub.