The build framework for Eleventy sites.

Start building your site and skip the setup work.

Eleventy is a static site generator that leaves the structural decisions to you. Most Eleventy projects end up making the same ones: an asset pipeline, images, head tags, structured data, multilingual support, sitemaps.

Baseline is those decisions already made and fitted together in one plugin, following Eleventy's own conventions. A framework in what it decides, a plugin in how it installs.

Install and start

npm install @11ty/eleventy @11ty/eleventy-img
npm install @apleasantview/eleventy-plugin-baseline

Install the packages, register Baseline in your Eleventy config, and run the dev server. The quickstart walks through the full setup.

If you are new to Eleventy, the introduction chapter will get you on your way.

Built on standards and conventions

Baseline sits on Eleventy rather than around it. The data cascade, the template languages and the plugin API stay exactly as documented, so what you already know still applies. Markdown and front matter are the source of truth, Nunjucks where a page needs logic. HTML first, then CSS, then JavaScript where the page earns it.

Baseline does not prescribe components, a CSS methodology or a frontend framework, and it ships no client-side runtime.

Under the hood: Eleventy · eleventy-img · Markdown · Nunjucks · PostCSS · esbuild

Running on Baseline

The site you are reading runs on Baseline. Open any docs page: the table of contents is built from the rendered HTML, the "Linked from" footer reads the content graph, and the structured data in the head is that same graph, projected for search engines.

View source. Browse the repo. Run it locally.

Read the longer story behind it.

Open source

Baseline is MIT-licensed and free, developed in the open and maintained by a pleasant view.

For community support and questions about Eleventy itself, join the Eleventy Discord server.

Commercial support is available directly from the maintainer.

Rolling releases

Baseline ships continuously. Each release advances the work, marked 0.1.0-next.X. Breaking changes arrive with the line you have to change, written out in the release notes. Pin a version when you build something serious on top.

For bugs or doc errors, Please open an issue. If something in the docs claims a behaviour you cannot reproduce, the docs are probably wrong.