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.

Examples

Apply a default layout to multiple templates

{ "layout": "layouts/post.njk" }

Using the above in posts/posts.json will configure a layout for all of the templates inside of posts/*.

Additional Customizations

• The name of the data file must match either the post or the directory it resides within. You can change this behavior using the setDataFileBaseName method in the Configuration API.
• You can use the setDataFileSuffixes Configuration API method to customize the default file suffixes or disable this feature altogether.
• 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.

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. Template Data Files ⬅
4. Directory Data Files (and ascending Parent Directories) ⬅
5. Front Matter Data in Layouts (this moved in 1.0)
6. Configuration API Global Data
7. Global Data Files

Other pages in Data Cascade:

• Front Matter Data
  • Custom Front Matter
• Template & Directory Data Files
• Global Data Files
• Data Deep Merge
• Config Global Data
• Computed Data
• Validate Data