eleventy-plugin-metagen

eleventy-plugin-metagen

An Eleventy shortcode that generates document metadata containing: Open Graph, Twitter card, generic meta tags and a canonical link.

Installation

In your Eleventy project, install the plugin from npm:

npm install eleventy-plugin-metagen

Then add it to your Eleventy Config file:

const metagen = require('eleventy-plugin-metagen');

module.exports = (eleventyConfig) => {
    eleventyConfig.addPlugin(metagen);
};

What does it do?

The plugin turns 11ty shortcodes like this:

{% metagen
    title="Eleventy Plugin Meta Generator",
    desc="An eleventy shortcode for generating meta tags.",
    url="https://tannerdolby.com",
    img="https://tannerdolby.com/images/arch-spiral-large.jpg",
    img_alt="Archimedean Spiral",
    twitter_card_type="summary_large_image",
    twitter_handle="tannerdolby",
    name="Tanner Dolby",
    comments=true
%}

into <meta> tags and other document metadata like this:

<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<title>Eleventy Plugin Meta Generator</title>
<meta name="author" content="Tanner Dolby">
<meta name="description" content="An eleventy shortcode for generating meta tags.">
<!-- Open Graph -->
<meta property="og:type" content="website">
<meta property="og:locale" content="en_US">
<meta property="og:title" content="Eleventy Plugin Meta Generator">
<meta property="og:description" content="An eleventy shortcode for generating meta tags.">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://tannerdolby.com">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://tannerdolby.com/images/arch-spiral-large.jpg">
<meta property="og:image:alt" content="Archimedean Spiral">
<!-- Twitter -->
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@tannerdolby">
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@tannerdolby">
<meta name="twitter:url" content="https://tannerdolby.com">
<meta name="twitter:title" content="Eleventy Plugin Meta Generator">
<meta name="twitter:description" content="An eleventy shortcode for generating meta tags.">
<meta name="twitter:image" content="https://tannerdolby.com/images/arch-spiral-large.jpg">
<meta name="twitter:image:alt" content="Archimedean Spiral">
<link rel="canonical" href="https://tannerdolby.com">

Custom Usage

For a baseline social share functionality, providing all of the comma separated arguments to metagen shown in the example usage above is recommended. If you want to add more tags not listen in the example, see You might only need a few <meta> tags instead of the whole set, simply provide the arguments you need and the ones not included won't generate <meta> tags.

Besides the default generated <meta> tags, only the arguments you provide data for will be generated as <meta> tags. This allows you to include some of your own tags alongside metagen if you need. Template variables can be used in the Nunjucks and Liquid shortcode arguments without the curly braces or quotes like title=page.url (Nunjucks) or title (Liquid). See the eleventy-plugin-metagen documentation for more details on plugin usage.

Use Your Template Data

To make your metadata dynamic, you can use template data as arguments to the shortcode, without quotes or braces:

---
title: Some title
desc: Some description
metadata:
  title: Some other title
  desc: Some other description
url: https://tannerdolby.com
image: https://tannerdolby.com/images/arch-spiral-large.jpg
alt: Archimedean spiral
type: summary_large_image 
twitter: tannerdolby
name: Tanner Dolby
---
{% metagen
    title=title or metadata.title,
    desc=desc or metadata.desc,
    url=url + page.url,
    img=image,
    img_alt=alt,
    twitter_card_type=type,
    twitter_handle=twitter,
    name=name
%}

As a general rule, don't forget your in a templating engine context. Use your variables in the shortcode as you would inside {% var %} tags or {{ var }} without the curly braces like title=var.

Meta Tag Reference

Most all of the <meta> tags found in the documentation below are supported by this plugin. If there is a <meta> tag that you need and isn't supported, feel free to open an issue so we can get it added. See metagen docs for more information about this plugin.

• Open Graph
• Twitter Card

Other Meta tag generators

• eleventy-plugin-meta-generator