Create a JSON feed with 11ty

Eleventy is great because you can literally output anything. To output a JSON feed with 11ty, all you need to do is create a file called feed.njk and adding the following to it:

---
permalink: '/my-cool-feed.json'
---
{
  "posts": [
    {% for item in collections.posts %}
      {
        "title": "{{ item.data.title }}",
        "url": "{{ item.url }}"
      }{% if not loop.last %},{% endif %}
    {% endfor %}
  ]
}

The JSON feed will give you an output like this:

{
  "posts": [
    {
      "title": "Quick and simple image placeholder",
      "url": "/posts/quick-and-simple-image-placeholder/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Color Palette Generator",
      "url": "/posts/color-palette-generator/"
    }
  ]
}

This little snippet creates a feed of posts that have a title and url. Whatever data you have access to in your collection, you can output in this feed, too.

Pro tip: Make sure you set the permalink to have a .json extension so the browser knows that it is application/json. That’ll save you a lot of server hassle!

You can grab a basic Eleventy starter for this demo here.