Eleventy Dev Server Added in v2.0.0

The Eleventy 2.0 release bundles a new development server. Check out the 11ty/eleventy-dev-server repository on GitHub.

At time of release, this new server helps Eleventy by:

• 🏋🏻‍♀️ Minimal footprint: 1.4 MB node_modules
  • Eleventy node_modules dropped from 155 MB to 34.3 MB
  • Faster Eleventy npm install times (30.5% faster)
  • Reduced Eleventy dependency count from 311 -> 211
• 📦 Decoupled from any Bundler
• 🚄 Fast ~2ms startup times
• ⚡️ WebSockets-based Live reload
• 🔬 DOM-diffing HTML updates
• ⚠️ No unresolved npm audit errors or warnings 👀
• 🚤 Supports emulated passthrough file copy for faster builds!

Read more on the Eleventy Dev Server 1.0 release notes.

Options Jump to heading #

You can configure the server with the new setServerOptions Configuration API method.

module.exports = function(eleventyConfig) {
  eleventyConfig.setServerOptions({
    // Default values are shown:

    // Whether the live reload snippet is used
    liveReload: true,

    // Whether DOM diffing updates are applied where possible instead of page reloads
    domDiff: true,

    // The starting port number
    // Will increment up to (configurable) 10 times if a port is already in use.
    port: 8080,

    // Additional files to watch that will trigger server updates
    // Accepts an Array of file paths or globs (passed to `chokidar.watch`).
    // Works great with a separate bundler writing files to your output folder.
    // e.g. `watch: ["_site/**/*.css"]`
    watch: [],

    // Show local network IP addresses for device testing
    showAllHosts: false,

    // Use a local key/certificate to opt-in to local HTTP/2 with https
    https: {
      // key: "./localhost.key",
      // cert: "./localhost.cert",
    },

    // Change the default file encoding for reading/serving files
    encoding: "utf-8",

    // Show the dev server version number on the command line
    showVersion: false,
  });
};

module.exports = function(eleventyConfig) {
  eleventyConfig.setServerOptions({
    // Show the server version number on the command line
    showVersion: false,

    // Change the name of the folder name used for injected scripts
    injectedScriptsFolder: ".11ty",

    // Number of times to increment a port is already in use
    portReassignmentRetryCount: 10,

    // Alias for backwards compatibility, renamed to `injectedScriptsFolder` in Dev Server 1.0+
    folder: ".11ty",

    // Alias for backwards compatibility, renamed to `liveReload` in Dev Server 1.0+
    enabled: true,

    // Alias for backwards compatibility, renamed to `domDiff` in Dev Server 1.0+
    domdiff: true,
  });
};

• Read more about chokidar.watch compatible paths
• For a full list of encoding values supported by Node (also used in the Content-Type HTTP Header), check out Node’s Buffer documentation.
• Using a root 404.html file (a popular convention supported by Netlify, GitHub Pages, Vercel, and others) supported! We use the content from a 404.html in your output folder when serving the error page for missing content.

Swap back to Browsersync Added in v2.0.0 Jump to heading #

You can swap back to Eleventy Dev Server using the setServerOptions configuration API and the @11ty/eleventy-server-browsersync package.

First, install it:

npm install @11ty/eleventy-server-browsersync

Then, enable it in your configuration file:

module.exports = function(eleventyConfig) {
  eleventyConfig.setServerOptions({
    module: "@11ty/eleventy-server-browsersync",

    // Default Browsersync options shown:
    port: 8080,
    open: false,
    notify: false,
    ui: false,
    ghostMode: false,

    // Opt-out of the Browsersync snippet
    // snippet: false,
  })
};

View the full list of Browsersync options.

setBrowserSyncConfig Jump to heading #

eleventyConfig.setBrowserSyncConfig was the previous Configuration API method used in versions of Eleventy prior to v2. It was changed to be a no-op in Eleventy v2 (it has no functional purpose).

Other pages in Watch and Serve:

• Eleventy Dev Server
• Browsersync
• Vite