Let’s say you wanted to build a site with Eleventy as the generator. Popular choice these days! Eleventy doesn’t have some particularly blessed way of preprocessing your CSS, if that’s something you want to do. There are a variety of ways to do it and perhaps that freedom is part of the spirit of Eleventy.

I’ve seen people set up Gulp for this, which is cool, I still use and like Gulp for some stuff. I’ve seen someone use templating to return preprocessed CSS, which seems weird, but hey, whatever works. I’ve even seen someone extend the Eleventy config itself to run the processing.

So far, the thing that has made the most sense to me is to use npm scripts do the Sass processing. Do the CSS first, then the HTML, with npm-run-all. So, you’d set up something like this in your package.json:

  "scripts": {
    "build": "npm-run-all build:css build:html",
    "build:css": "node-sass src/site/_includes/css/main.scss > src/site/css/main.css",
    "build:html": "eleventy",
    "watch": "npm-run-all --parallel watch:css watch:html",
    "watch:css": "node-sass --watch src/site/_includes/css/main.scss > src/site/css/main.css",
    "watch:html": "eleventy --serve --port=8181",
    "start": "npm run watch"
  },

I think that’s fairly nice. Since Eleventy doesn’t have a blessed CSS processing route anyway, it feels OK to have it de-coupled from Eleventy processing.

But I see Netlify has come along nicely with their build plugins. As Sarah put it:

What the Build Plugin does is give you access to key points in time during that process, for instance, onPreBuild, onPostBuild, onSuccess, and so forth. You can execute some logic at those specific points in time

There is something really intuitive and nice about that structure. A lot of build plugins are created by the community or Netlify themselves. You just click them on via the UI or reference them in your config. But Sass isn’t a build-in project (as I write), which I would assume is because people are a pretty opinionated about what/where/how their CSS is processed that it makes sense to just let people do it themselves. So let’s do that.

In our project, we’d create a directory for our plugins, and then a folder for this particular plugin we want to write:

project-root/
  src/
  whatever/
  plugins/
    sass/
      index.js
      manifest.yml

That index.js file is where we write our code, and we’ll specifically want to use the onPreBuild hook here, because we’d want our Sass to be done preprocessing before the build process runs Eleventy and Eleventy moves things around.

module.exports = {
  onPreBuild: async ({ utils: { run } }) => {
    await run.command(
      "node-sass src/site/_includes/css/main.scss src/site/css/main.css"
    );
  },
};

Here’s a looksie into all the relevant files together:

Now, if I netlify build from the command line, it will run the same build process that Netlify itself does, and it will hook into my plugin and run it!

One little thing I noticed is that I was trying to have my config be the (newer) netlify.yml format, but the plugins didn’t work, and I had to re-do the config as netlify.toml.

So we de-coupled ourselves from Eleventy with this particular processing, and coupled ourselves to Netlify. Just something to be aware of. I’m down with that as this way of configuring a build is so nice and I see so much potential in it.

I prefer the more explicit and broken up configuration of this style. Just look at how much cleaner the package.json gets:

I still have this idea…

…of building a site that is a dog-fooded example of all the stuff you could/should do during a build process. I’ve started the site here, (and repo), but it’s not doing too much yet. I think it would be cool to wire up everything on that list (and more?) via Build Plugins.

If you wanna contribute, feel free to let me know. Maybe email me or open an issue to talk about what you’d want to do. You’re free to do a Pull Request too, but PRs without any prior communication are a little tricky sometimes as it’s harder to ensure our visions are aligned before you put in a bunch of effort.