I’m slowly getting 11ty to behave on my new Linux setup. Right now, it keeps failing to connect to the local host. After some poking around, I’m fairly certain it’s because my computer now lacks Apache/some other way to make a server (as I don’t think other causes, like firewalls, are being applied + I tried various local host ports and none of the ones I tried worked). When I went to install it, though, I was immediately overwhelmed by all of the options in their projects directory. Not even sorting by category helped, as there’s two I think could maybe apply??? I. I don’t know how this works.
Which one is the best/”right” one for the job? Is Apache even the best solution to the simple issue of “local host no work”? Is there something really simple I overlooked when looking this up?
does 11ty allow you to use npm run dev i think is the proper command to run a local version of your website?
npm ERR! Missing script: "dev"
npm ERR!
npm ERR! To see a list of scripts, run:
npm ERR! npm run
npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:
npm ERR! /home/NAME/.npm/_logs/2025-08-29T16_03_54_458Z-debug-0.log
I’ll take that as a “no” :(
perhaps this run command on this website might be helpful. i apologize i don’t know a ton about 11ty i just know it can use npm if you want it to
Weird. The first time I did that, the local host kept failing to load no matter what I did. Refreshes, browser switches… honestly not sure what was different the second time to make it work. Or why it was failing in the first place.
But it did work this time! So I won’t complain lol.
Just want to add as an Eleventy user on Linux that you definitely do not need Apache, or another HTTP server, for running an Eleventy site locally. What you need is npm or another JavaScript runtime like Bun or Deno.
Eleventy does not come with npm run dev command script by default. You can run it with some other NodeJS/npm software because they have defined the command script in the package.json file by default.
You can still add your own command script in the package.json file under the “scripts” property. For example:
"scripts": {
"build": "npx @11ty/eleventy",
"dev": "npx @11ty/eleventy --serve"
},
This allows you to run npm run build command in the shell to build an Eleventy website locally, and run npm run dev command in the shell to run an Eleventy site locally.
In other words, the scripts in package.json are shell command aliases for running the npm project.
thank you for the explanation Leilukin
Understood! And I’ll see about adding those scripts to save me some time, as the full default command is easy to mistype.
I guess it just took a while for the local host to fully “build”/connect/(insert proper term here) when I first ran the command? Not sure.
Yup, adding your own npm scripts can save you some time in typing out long commands.
If you are switching to a new operating system, your Eleventy site project will likely need to install the necessary packages again to get the project working and running, so it’s possible that your Eleventy site project was just taking time to set up when you ran the command for the first time since switching to Linux.
