Deploy Eleventy (11ty) to thin.host

Build an Eleventy site to _site/ with a path prefix and publish it to thin.host. thin.host serves the static files and gives you a live URL right away. Your agent can do every step for you through the thin.host MCP server, or you can run one curl command.

At a glance

Before you start

• Requires: Node.js 18 or later.
• A thin.host account. Sign up, then create an API key under Settings (for curl and the local MCP server), or connect your agent with OAuth as shown in Quickstart (MCP).

Create a project (skip if you have one)

npm init -y && npm install @11ty/eleventy

Set the base path

Until a domain points at it, a thin.host site lives under a sub-path: https://thin.host/s/<slug>/. Eleventy's path prefix is applied by the bundled HTML base plugin, which rewrites root-relative URLs in the HTML it writes. Add the plugin once, then pass the prefix on the command line for the preview build.

// eleventy.config.js
import { HtmlBasePlugin } from '@11ty/eleventy';

export default function (eleventyConfig) {
  eleventyConfig.addPlugin(HtmlBasePlugin);
}

Pick the slug (my-site here) before you build the preview, and pass the same slug when you deploy.

Build

npx @11ty/eleventy

The finished site is in _site/. That folder is what you deploy.

Deploy from your agent (MCP)

Connect thin.host to Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code, Windsurf, Codex or ChatGPT once (setup for each client), then ask:

Build this Eleventy (11ty) project for thin.host with the slug my-site and publish the _site/ folder.

With the local server (uvx thinhost-mcp) the agent runs the build and calls publish_website with the absolute path of _site/; large builds are split across requests automatically. Later changes go out with update_website and sync=true, which also removes files the new build dropped.

The hosted connector (https://thin.host/mcp, used by claude.ai and ChatGPT) cannot read your disk. From a coding agent it uploads with the REST call below; otherwise it publishes from a public link to a zip or HTML file with publish_website_from_url.

Deploy with curl

cd _site && zip -r ../site.zip . && cd -
curl -F file=@site.zip -F title="My Eleventy (11ty) site" -F slug=my-site \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $THINHOST_API_KEY" \
  https://thin.host/v1/websites/archive

The JSON response includes url, the live address (https://thin.host/s/my-site/). To redeploy, upload the new zip to the site's archive endpoint; pages and assets missing from it are removed:

curl -F file=@site.zip \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $THINHOST_API_KEY" \
  https://thin.host/v1/websites/my-site/archive

A single upload can be up to 30 MB. See the REST API reference for every field.

Add a custom domain

1. Open the site in the dashboard and add your hostname under Custom Domains, for example www.example.com. A <name>.thin.host subdomain is free and works immediately.
2. Create the DNS record the dashboard shows: a CNAME pointing at cname.thin.host. TLS is issued automatically once DNS resolves.
3. Rebuild with the base path / (npx @11ty/eleventy) and redeploy.

Pages on a custom domain get a canonical tag, a generated robots.txt and a sitemap.xml.

Eleventy (11ty) notes

• The plugin rewrites URLs in .html output only. URLs inside CSS or JavaScript files are not prefixed; use the htmlBaseUrl filter for unusual spots.

FAQ

Sources

Commands and options checked against the official Eleventy (11ty) docs on 2026-10-14:

• Eleventy: Deploy to a subdirectory with a path prefix
• Eleventy: HTML <base> plugin
• Eleventy: Get started

Other frameworks: all deploy guides. Coming from another host? Compare thin.host.