Pass-through File Copy #

New in v0.2.7

Eleventy, by default, searches for any file in the input directory with an extension listed in the templateFormats configuration option. That means if you’ve listed njk in your templateFormats, we’ll look for any Nunjucks templates (files with the .njk file extension).

If you list a format in the templateFormats array that isn’t a valid template, it’ll throw an error. Enabling passthroughFileCopy in your configuration changes this behavior. Setting passthroughFileCopy: true will copy files with non-matching template file extensions directly to your output directory without modification.

module.exports = {
  templateFormats: [
    "md",
    "css" // css is not yet a valid template extension
  ],
  passthroughFileCopy: true
};

Although css is not currently a recognized Eleventy template, Eleventy will now search for any *.css files inside of the input directory and copy them to output (keeping directory structure).

You might also imagine using this for images by adding "jpg", "png", or maybe even "webp".

Manual Passthrough Copy (Faster) #

New in v0.2.14

Searching the entire directory structure for files to copy based on file extensions is not optimal with large directory structures. If we know what non-template static content we want to appear in our output, we can opt-in to specify files or directories for Eleventy to copy. This will probably speed up your build times. These entries are relative to your the root of your project and not your Eleventy input directory.

module.exports = function(eleventyConfig) {
  // Copy the `img/` directory 
  eleventyConfig.addPassthroughCopy("img");
  
  // Copy the `css/fonts/` directory
  // If you use a subdirectory, it’ll copy using the same directory structure.
  eleventyConfig.addPassthroughCopy("css/fonts");
  
  return {
    passthroughFileCopy: true
  };
};

As shown in the code sample above, this feature requires passthroughFileCopy: true in your Eleventy config file.

Passthrough All Content #

New in v0.5.4

Given that global copy of all content in the directory may be a security risk, we do not copy anything that doesn’t match the file extensions listed in templateFormats. Note that we do provide a command line flag to bypass this behavior: --passthroughall. Intentionally, there is no configuration option to do this.

# Copies ALL files in the input directory to the output directory
npx eleventy --passthroughall