--- title: 'Eleventy Baseline' description: 'Eleventy Baseline is a plugin for Eleventy that provides a ready-made site foundation with assets, metadata, and a live content graph that keeps rendered output in sync.' slug: 'home' type: 'page' date: 2026-05-17T00:00:00.000Z lang: 'en' translationKey: 'homepage' url: 'https://www.eleventy-baseline.dev/' --- Every working Eleventy site rebuilds the same foundation: asset compilation, head tags, sitemap, image handling. The same groundwork every time. And every site hits the same limit. Your front matter is readable from anywhere. The rendered output is not. So you end up writing the same workarounds: a backlinks index built from filenames, a table of contents re-parsed from Markdown, structured data hand-rolled per page. All of it running parallel to the rendered output, drifting out of sync the moment anything is renamed. Eleventy Baseline provides both, ready on day one. Already built, with a live reflection of everything you render. Your project still belongs to you. --- ## In practice Baseline is a working foundation for Eleventy sites. Images render at the right widths in modern formats, lazy by default. Links between pages live by name, so folder moves do not break them. The head tags fill from one settings file, with page-level overrides where needed. Your layouts, styles, scripts, and editorial structure stay yours. Keep the defaults where they help, and override where you need to. --- ## Built on Baseline The site you are reading runs on Baseline. What you are looking at is the system itself in use, not an illustration of it. Open any docs page and try it: the table of contents is built from the rendered HTML, the "Linked from" footer reads the content graph, the language switcher reads the settings, and the structured-data graph in the head is that same content graph, projected for search engines. All wired by the same system you are reading about. View source. Browse the repo. Run it locally. It's visible. --- ## The three-layer architecture Responsibilities stay separated, and each layer has one job. Changes stay predictable as the site grows. ### State Your settings and options, normalised once at startup. Every module reads the same shape. ### Runtime What the build knows about itself: the templates, the translations, the content graph. Modules read from here instead of from each other. ### Modules The features that read from both: assets, head, multilang, navigator, sitemap. None of them call each other; they read what they need from runtime. Full breakdown in the [[docs | docs]]. --- ## Install and start Install the packages, register Baseline in your Eleventy config, and run the dev server. ```bash npm install @11ty/eleventy @11ty/eleventy-img npm install @apleasantview/eleventy-plugin-baseline npm run dev ``` The [[quickstart | quickstart]] walks through the full setup. The [[docs | docs]] cover the concept, modules and the architecture. The [[simple-baseline-site | simple site tutorial]] builds a small site from zero. ### Rolling releases Baseline ships continuously. Each release advances the work, marked `0.1.0-next.X`. Pin a version when you build something serious on top. If something in the docs claims a behaviour you cannot reproduce, the docs are probably wrong. Please [open an issue](https://github.com/apleasantview/eleventy-plugin-baseline/issues). Commercial support available from [a pleasant view](https://www.apleasantview.com).