The Trevor Project — Saving Young LGBTQ Lives
Eleventy
The possum is Eleventy’s mascot

Eleventy Documentation

This is an older version of Eleventy. Go to the newest Eleventy docs (current path: /docs/data-template-dir/) or the full release history.
Menu

Template and Directory Specific Data Files New in v0.2.14 #

While you can provide global data files to supply data to all of your templates, you may want some of your data to be available locally only to one specific template or to a directory of templates. For that use, we also search for JSON and JavaScript Data Files in specific places in your directory structure.

Important exception: Template and Directory Specific Data Files are not preprocessed through a templating engine. Global Data files are.

For example, consider a template located at posts/subdir/my-first-blog-post.md. Eleventy will look for data in the following places (starting with highest priority, local data keys override global data):

  1. Content Template Front Matter Data
  2. Template Data File (data is only applied to posts/subdir/my-first-blog-post.md)
    • posts/subdir/my-first-blog-post.11tydata.js New in v0.5.3JavaScript Data Files
    • posts/subdir/my-first-blog-post.11tydata.json New in v0.5.3
    • posts/subdir/my-first-blog-post.json
  3. Directory Data File (data applies to all templates in posts/subdir/*)
  4. Parent Directory Data File (data applies to all templates in posts/**/*, including subdirectories) New in v0.2.15
  5. Global Data Files in _data/* (.js or .json files) available to all templates.
Note that the name of the data file must match either the post or the directory it resides within.

Note that any Custom Formats New in v0.10.0 specified in your configuration will also be taken into account at a lower priority than their JavaScript or JSON counterparts.

Change the .11tydata.js file suffix New in v0.5.3 #

Use the Configuration API to change the file suffix used to search for Eleventy data files.

Example: Apply a default layout to multiple templates #

Try adding { "layout": "layouts/post.njk" } to posts/posts.json to configure a layout for all of the templates inside of posts/*.

Sources of Data #

When the data is merged in the Eleventy Data Cascade, the order of priority for sources of data is (from highest priority to lowest):

  1. Computed Data
  2. Front Matter Data in a Template
  3. Front Matter Data in Layouts (only in 0.x)
  4. Template Data Files ⬅
  5. Directory Data Files (and ascending Parent Directories) ⬅
  6. Front Matter Data in Layouts (moved in 1.0)
  7. Configuration API Global Data
  8. Global Data Files

Other pages in Data Cascade: