Layouts #

Eleventy Layouts are special templates that can be used to wrap other content. To denote that a piece of content should be wrapped in a template, simply use the layout key in your front matter, like so:

Filename content-using-layout.md

---
layout: mylayout.njk
title: My Rad Markdown Blog Post
---
# {{ title }}

This will look for a mylayout.njk Nunjucks file in your includes folder (_includes/mylayout.njk). Note that you can have a separate folder for Eleventy layouts if you’d prefer that to having them live in your includes folder.

You can use any template language in your layout—it doesn’t need to match the template language of the content. An ejs template can use a njk layout, for example.

If you omit the file extension (for example layout: mylayout), Eleventy will cycle through all of the supported template formats (mylayout.*) to look for a matching layout file.

Next, we need to create a mylayout.njk file. It can contain any type of text, but here we’re using HTML:

Filename _includes/mylayout.njk

---
title: My Rad Blog
---
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
    <title>{{ title }}</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    {{ content | safe }}
  </body>
</html>

Note that the layout template will populate the content data with the child template’s content. Also note that we don’t want to double-escape the output, so we’re using the provided Nunjuck’s safe filter here (see more language double-escaping syntax below).

Layouts can contain their own front matter data! It’ll be merged with the content’s data on render. Content data takes precedence, if conflicting keys arise. Read more about how Eleventy merges data in what we call the Data Cascade.

All of this will output the following HTML content:

Filename _site/content-using-layout/index.html

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
    <title>My Rad Markdown Blog Post</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>My Rad Markdown Blog Post</h1>
  </body>
</html>

Front Matter Data in Layouts #

Take note that in Eleventy’s Data Cascade, front matter data in your template is merged with Layout front matter data! All data is merged ahead of time so that you can mix and match variables in your content and layout templates interchangeably.

Note that front matter data set in a content template takes priority over layout front matter! Chained layouts have similar merge behavior. The closer to the content, the higher priority the data.

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):

Layouts in a Subdirectory New in v0.2.7 #

Layouts can be a full path inside of the includes folder, like so:

---
layout: layouts/base.njk
---

This will look for _includes/layouts/base.njk.

Layout Aliasing New in v0.2.8 #

Configuration API: use eleventyConfig.addLayoutAlias(from, to) to add layout aliases! Say you have a bunch of existing content using layout: post. If you don’t want to rewrite all of those values, just map post to a new file like this:

Filename .eleventy.js

module.exports = function(eleventyConfig) {
  eleventyConfig.addLayoutAlias('post', 'layouts/post.njk');
};

Prevent double-escaping in layouts #

Template Language	Unescaped Content (for layout content)	Comparison with an Escaped Output	Docs
Nunjucks	`{{ content \| safe }}`	`{{ value }}`	Docs
EJS	`<%- content %>`	`<%= value %>`	Docs
Handlebars	`{{{ content }}}` (triple stash)	`{{ value }}` (double stash)	Docs
Mustache	`{{{ content }}}` (triple stash)	`{{ value }}` (double stash)	Docs
Liquid	is by default unescaped so you can use `{{ content }}`	`{{ value \| escape}}`	Docs
HAML	`! #{ content }`	`= #{ content }`	Docs
Pug	`!{content}`	`#{value}`	Docs

Layout Chaining #

Chaining multiple layouts together. Read more about Layout Chaining.

Eleventy Documentation