11ty-drafts

This example shows how you can use Eleventy's permalink:false and eleventyExcludeFromCollections:true to conditionally hide contents from your site and/or collections. It also shows how you can use custom metadata (in this case draft:true as a shortcut for setting these two properties) using eleventyComputed.

FILES

1. There are 9 files in our src/posts/ folder
   1. /src/posts/{1-7}.njk — Our individual post templates.
   2. /src/posts/index.njk — The index page which lists the non-draft posts.
   3. /src/posts.json — Our directory data file which sets custom frontmatter data for each of the files in the current folder.
2. We also have a /src/src.11tydata.js directory data file which uses eleventyComputed to set some values globally for each file in the /src/ folder (the entire site).
3. Finally in our /.eleventy.js file, we set eleventyConfig.setDataDeepMerge(true) so all of the values get merged from the custom files. NOTE: this will be the default behavior in Eleventy v1+.

POSTS

• /src/posts/1.njk (and /src/posts/3.njk)

  ---
  title: PoSt OnE
  ---
  <h1>{{ title }}</h1>

  Default behavior. Neither draft:true or eleventyExcludeFromCollections or permalink:false are set.
• /src/posts/2.njk (and /src/posts/4.njk)

  ---
  title: PoSt TwO
  draft: true
  ---
  <h1>{{ title }}</h1>

  draft:true set in frontmatter. This will exclude the files from being generated in the output directory because of the custom rules in our ./src/src.11tydata.js file.
• /src/posts/5.njk

  ---
  title: PoSt FiVe
  draft: false
  ---
  <h1>{{ title }}</h1>

  draft:false is set in frontmatter. This is basically a no-op since the default behavior would be live posts anyways.
• /src/posts/6.njk

  ---
  title: PoSt SiX
  permalink: false
  ---
  <h1>{{ title }}</h1>

  permalink:false is set in frontmatter. Since permalink:false is explicitly set, Eleventy would not write the file out to the output directory.
• /src/posts/7.njk

  ---
  title: PoSt SeVeN
  eleventyExcludeFromCollections: true
  ---
  <h1>{{ title }}</h1>

  eleventyExcludeFromCollections:true is set in frontmatter. Since only the eleventyExcludeFromCollections is set, the file is still written to the output directory, but it won't be added to the post collection (per the /src/posts/posts.json directory data file; see below)
• /src/posts/index.njk

  ---
  title: Posts
  eleventyExcludeFromCollections: true
  ---
  <ul>
  {% for post in collections.post %}
    <li><a href="{{ post.url | url }}">{{ post.data.title }}</a></li>
  {% endfor %}
  </ul>

  eleventyExcludeFromCollection:true is set in frontmatter. This will explictly prevent the index page from being added to the collections.post collection. We also loop over the collections.post collection and display each page's URL and title from the frontmatter.
• /src/posts/posts.json

  {
    "tags": ["post"]
  }

  Sets the post tag for each page in the /src/posts/* directory, which will add the page to the collections.post collection, unless eleventyExcludeFromCollections is set to true.

DRAFT MODE

Our custom draft frontmatter is handled by the /src/src.11tydata.js file:

module.exports = {
  eleventyComputed: {
    permalink(data) {
      // If the page is in `draft:true` mode, don't write it to disk...
      if (data.draft) {
        return false;
      }
      // Return the original value (which could be `false`, or a custom value,
      // or default empty string).
      return data.permalink;
    },
    eleventyExcludeFromCollections(data) {
      // If the page is in `draft:true` mode, or has `permalink:false` exclude
      // it from any collections since it shouldn't be visible anywhere.
      if (data.draft || data.permalink === false) {
        return true;
      }
      return data.eleventyExcludeFromCollections;
    }
  }
};

We use eleventyComputed to dynamically recalculate the permalink and eleventyExcludeFromCollections properties for each page in our site (using a root-level directory data file in our "/src/" input directory; as specified in the .eleventy.js config file).

The permalink computed data checks to see if the draft property exists in our frontmatter, and is truthy (returning false if truthy, or the current frontmatter value for permalink otherwise).

The eleventyExcludeFromCollections computed data checks to see if the draft property exists [and is truthy] in our frontmatter, as well as whether the current permalink value is false. If either of these conditions are truthy we return true and the current page/post will be exxcluded from all collections. Otherwise, we return the current value of eleventyExcludeFromCollections.

OUTPUT

We can see that only 5 files get written to our output directory:

• www/posts/{1,3,5,7}/index.html
• www/posts/index.html

tree -a www
www
└── posts
    ├── 1/index.html
    ├── 3/index.html
    ├── 5/index.html
    ├── 7/index.html
    └── index.html

5 directories, 5 files

Interestingly (or not), here's the output of the www/posts/index.html file:

<ul>
  <li><a href="/posts/1/">PoSt OnE</a></li>
  <li><a href="/posts/3/">PoSt ThReE</a></li>
  <li><a href="/posts/5/">PoSt FiVe</a></li>
</ul>

We can see that only /post/1/, /post/3/, and /post/5/ are linked (due to /src/posts/7.njk explicitly setting eleventyExcludeFromCollections:true in the frontmatter, excluding it from the collections.post collection).