11ty

Drop-in recipe for indexing the 11ty base blog.

Prerequisite

The 11ty static site generator is very popular, and with good reason: it's relatively lightweight and simple, and can be very powerful.

Start with the base blog to keep it simple.

Folder Structure

The base blog has posts inside a posts folder, but other pages can be in any sub-folder. The generated output is in a _site folder, so that's also where we'll put the Hunch index file.

/hunch.config.js
/package.json
/about
    /index.md # this translates to `site.com/about`
/posts
    /firstpost.md # this translates to `site.com/posts/firstpost`
/_site
    /hunch.json
    # ...other generated files...

Configuration

The default Hunch configuration is almost sufficient, but since content can be multiple root folders, we need to specify some filters:

// hunch.config.js
export default {
    // The folder to scan is actually the root folder:
    input: './',
    // The index file will go with the 11ty generated files:
    output: './_site/hunch.json',
    // Property names of metadata to treat as "collections", like "tags" or "authors".
    aggregations: {
        // The main metadata in the 11ty base blog:
        tags: {
            title: 'Tags',
            conjunction: false,
        }
    },
    // The content and all aggregation fields will be searchable automatically, but
    // we need to specify additional searchable fields:
    searchableFields: [
        'title',
        'description',
    ],
    // We also need to be explicit about what non-searchable, non-aggregated fields
    // to store with the index.
    storedFields: [
        'date',
    ],
    // Since 11ty stores all content at the folder root, we need to filter files.
    preFilter: filepath => {
        const baseDir = filepath.split('/')[0]
        const EXCLUDED_DIRS = [
            '.github',
            '_site',
            '_data',
            '_includes',
            'css',
            'feed',
            'img',
            'node_modules',
        ]
        return !EXCLUDED_DIRS.includes(baseDir)
    }
}

Indexing

Add the Hunch indexing step as a post-build step to the base blog package.json file:

  "scripts": {
    "build": "npx @11ty/eleventy",
+   "postbuild": "hunch",
    "bench": "DEBUG=Eleventy:Benchmark* npx @11ty/eleventy",

Then, when you run npm run build to build the 11ty site, Hunch will run on completion and output _site/hunch.json.