Eleventy Documentation


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Pass-through File Copy

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 unknown files directly to your output directory without modification.

// .eleventy.js
module.exports = {
templateFormats: [
"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)

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 for you. 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.

// .eleventy.js
module.exports = function(eleventyConfig) {
// use a subdirectory, it’ll copy using the same directory structure.
return {
passthroughFileCopy: true