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-baselineInstall 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.
What you get
Assets
The asset pipeline, wired. One entry point per asset directory: index.css runs through PostCSS, index.js through esbuild. Images render at the right widths in modern formats, lazy by default.
SEO
The head tags fill from one settings file, with page-level overrides where needed. <baseline-head> emits a canonical link, Open Graph, Twitter Cards and a JSON-LD structured-data graph, with no per-page wiring.
The structured-data construction follows the model of seo-graph-core, by Joost de Valk of Yoast.
Multilingual
Directory-based multilingual support: per-language collections, translation mapping, hreflang, and i18n filters. Sitemaps come per language, with an index on top.
One content graph underneath
Backlinks, wikilinks that survive a folder move, breadcrumbs and the structured data in the head are all projections of one content graph.
Without it, each of those is a thing you maintain by hand: a backlinks index built from filenames, a table of contents re-parsed from Markdown, structured data written page by page. All of it drifting the moment you rename a file.
Baseline builds that graph from the HTML after it renders, so it is always what you actually shipped.
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.