Fetching a JSON file from GitHub at build time in Eleventy

Sep 25, 2025 · 2 minutes to read

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So, I was reading through an interesting discussion on the Eleventy Discord server the other day, and fLaMEd fury said something that struck me. It was something I didn't know you could do and it was something that removed a roadblock in my mind.

In this simple phrase, he said: "...powered by a JSON file that is fetched (with eleventy-fetch) from a seperate repo..."

I had been wanting to undertake a redesign of the 11ty Bundle site, but was stuck in my head on a problem that was quite solvable. The JSON file that is the database for the site lives in the same repo as the site itself. Whenever I want to change the code that drives the site, I generally create a new branch. But with the db in the same repo, I would have to revert to the main branch before adding entries to the JSON file and pushing the changes. It was a hassle that I wanted to avoid.

So, I created a separate repo for the JSON file, and then I set about figuring out how to fetch that file at build time in Eleventy. Very simple with the Eleventy's Fetch plugin. I just needed to do something like this:

const BUNDLEDB_URL =
  "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/USERNAME/REPO/BRANCH/path/to/bundledb.json";

// Fetch the json db from its remote repo
const bundleRecords = await Fetch(BUNDLEDB_URL, {
  duration: "1d", // cache for 1 day
  type: "json",
};

I learned about the whole raw.githubusercontent.com thing by way of GitHub Copilot. I'm finding that as a source of small bits of knowledge, it can be quite useful.

After I set up the build to use the remote JSON file, I realized that I was also faced with the issue of updating the node scripts that I use to manage the file. Thankfully, as I was developing those tools, I set up a config file with all the necessary directory and file references that can be used throughout all the scripts.

Once I adapted the tools to use the new location for the file on my local system, it worked like a charm.

Now I just have to figure out how to trigger a rebuild of the 11ty Bundle site whenever I push changes to the repo for the JSON file. Perhaps I can do that with GitHub Actions or some other triggering mechanism on Cloudflare.

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