Eleventy: Unrecognized files should be copied by default

[alexgleason]

11ty is very nice, thank you!

However it was quite difficult to figure out how to get a normal site with images and CSS working. I don't really understand why configuration is required for this to work, which seems to go against 11ty being a "zero config" static site server.

In virtually every project I use this for, I am going to be required to include an .eleventy.js just so images and css copy over. I suggest making this the default.

[zachleat]

Before I leave a lengthier comment, be aware that we do offer the --templateFormats command line option https://www.11ty.io/docs/config/#template-formats

[zachleat]

Just so we’re clear up front—defaults changes are very contentious and require careful release management. And changing eleventy to copy _everything_ would be a hell of a default to change. It could potentially leak sensitive files to production sites unintentionally.

So, I’m not sure I’m on board with changing the global default here—but I’m happy to discuss it.

My preference would be to be more surgical and include file extension types that provide some kind of value.

For example:

• adding a css type that optionally outputs an additional minified file.
• a png or jpg type that runs imageoptim and maybe outputs some different resolutions for srcset
• a ttf type that outputs woff and woff2

I’d probably be open to just including the css and/or a few image types by default so that they’re copied without additional configuration. But global unrecognized files seems too broad and dangerous.

[jmegs]

There are a couple of patterns I noticed that might help with this

1. Jekyll copies directories and files relative to the source dir unless they're prefixed with an underscore. ./css/ is transferred ./_secrets/ isn't

2. A lot of others have the notion of a dump dir or 'static' folder where the contents are output to the site root. ex. ./dumpDir/foo.css becomes ./foo.css in the output.

A lot comes down to whether you want to include any kind of asset pipeline outside of transforming templates > html. If there was a styles and image minification solution baked in like your above comment having a folder like /assets that you could watch for css/scss/styl files and jpg/png/svg images would be _amazing_

[zachleat]

Related: #117

[zachleat]

I did a bit of work just to try this out. It’s currently in the passthroughall branch and is not available by default. It’s enabled using the --passthroughall cmd line option. It will copy everything in the input directory but will only process files that have a valid template extension.

[zachleat]

--passthroughall will be included with the next minor version.

[zachleat]

Fixed by https://github.com/11ty/eleventy/commit/d44bfc725e35a9339d88bb3a7f93c34b47649913