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Debug Mode

Contents

Having trouble? Want to see what Eleventy is doing behind the scenes? Use DEBUG mode. We’re taking advantage of the excellent debug package for this.

debug will tell you exactly what directories Eleventy is using for data, includes, input, and output. It’ll tell you what search globs it uses to find your templates and what templates it finds. If you’re having trouble, enable this.

This makes use of something called Environment variables to enable, specifically the DEBUG environment variable. In this case we’re just putting some text before the command we use to run Eleventy.

Commands Jump to heading

Mac OS (or Linux, etc) Jump to heading

What is the difference between Local and Global installation?

Installed Globally
DEBUG=Eleventy* eleventy
Installed Locally
DEBUG=Eleventy* npx @11ty/eleventy

Windows Jump to heading

Read more about Windows environment variables.

cmd.exe Jump to heading

What is the difference between Local and Global installation?

Installed Locally
set DEBUG=Eleventy* & npx @11ty/eleventy
Installed Globally
set DEBUG=Eleventy* & eleventy

Powershell (VS Code default) Jump to heading

What is the difference between Local and Global installation?

Installed Locally
$env:DEBUG="Eleventy*"; npx @11ty/eleventy
Installed Globally
$env:DEBUG="Eleventy*"; eleventy

Learn More Jump to heading

Read more at the debug package documentation.

Try with --dryrun Jump to heading

Works great with --dryrun if you want to run Eleventy but not actually write any files.

View all messages Jump to heading

The commands above limit the messages from debug to Eleventy specific things with DEBUG=Eleventy* but you can view all of the messages from any dependency with DEBUG=*.

Analyze Performance Jump to heading

Read more about how to use debug to analyze the performance of your Eleventy build.

Debug individual variables Jump to heading

In addition to using debug, you can use the global filter log to console.log anything from inside a template file.

Other pages in Getting Started: