Template and Directory Specific Data Files #

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.

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
   • merged with any Layout 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 JavaScript Data Files
   • posts/subdir/my-first-blog-post.11tydata.json
   • posts/subdir/my-first-blog-post.json
3. Directory Data File (data applies to all templates in posts/subdir/*)
   • posts/subdir/subdir.11tydata.js JavaScript Data Files
   • posts/subdir/subdir.11tydata.json
   • posts/subdir/subdir.json
4. Parent Directory Data File (data applies to all templates in posts/**/*, including subdirectories)
   • posts/posts.11tydata.js JavaScript Data Files
   • posts/posts.11tydata.json
   • posts/posts.json
5. Global Data Files in _data/* (.js or .json files) available to all templates.

Note that any Custom Formats 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 #

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:

• Front Matter Data
  • Customize Front Matter Parsing
• Template & Directory Data Files
• Global Data Files
  • Data Preprocessing
• Data Deep Merge
• Config Global Data
• Computed Data