I made an Eleventy & Nix static site template

• 16 February 2025
• webdev,
• nixos

I've had to create a new Eleventy site on NixOS a bunch of times lately, so I figured I make a template to save myself repeating the same steps over and over.

Hopefully this will come in helpful for anyone else who's attempting to build Eleventy (or any other npm-based site generator) on NixOS.

The source code for the template I made is here: git.chobble.com/chobble/empty-eleventy-nix-site

To get started just run git clone https://git.chobble.com/chobble/empty-eleventy-nix-site, then cd to the directory, run direnv allow or nix develop, and then serve to get a server running locally.

You can also run nix-build to reproducibly build the site using Nix - I call this from my NixOS site builder which powers the Chobble server.

To quote its README.md:

This template should let you get started with the Eleventy static site builder on NixOS / Nix, really easily.

Featuring Nix'y features like:

• direnv support via flake.nix - run direnv allow
• or run nix develop if you don't have direnv
• nix-build support using flake-compat
• serve shell script to run Eleventy and SASS locally
• build shell script to build the site into _site

And Eleventy features like:

• Canonical URLs
• A directory to store favicon cruft
• A _data/site.json metadata store
• An collection.images collection of the files in src/images

Changing Packages

If you want to change the packages in packages.json, here's the steps:

• Remove all nodeModules lines from node-deps.nix and flake.nix
• Use direnv reload or nix develop to get a dev shell
• Add the new packages to node-deps.nix and run direnv reload to re-build packages.json
• Run yarn -l to create a new yard.lock
• Re-add the nodeModule lines to node-deps.nix and flake.nix

Upgrading Packages

This is a little fiddlier:

• Remove all nodeModules lines from node-deps.nix and flake.nix
• Copy the generated package.json to your clipboard
• Delete package.json to remove the symbolic link
• Paste your clipbard back into a new package.json
• Run yarn upgrade to create a new yarn.lock and update package.json
• Copy those new version numbers from package.json to node-deps.nix
• Re-add the nodeModule lines to node-deps.nix and flake.nix

..I do intend to make those steps simpler some day. If you've got ideas of how I could, please contact me!

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