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Logging with Eleventy and Nunjucks

This site was forked from the Eleventy base blog and uses Nunjucks templates. When everything is working, it is as smooth as can be. But when I run into an issue, I often find it difficult to debug.

Recently I was trying to do some logical rendering based on article tags. I knew the information was at my finger tips, but I couldn’t guess the right key. All I need is a simple console.log()!

I searched combinations like “debugging in eleventy” and “console logging in nunjucks”, but none of the suggestions quite worked. But they did give me an idea: a custom filter for logging.

Opening up .eleventy.js, I added the following lines:

eleventyConfig.addFilter('log', value => {
    console.log(value)
})

With that, I could then use the log filter in my Nunjuck template:

{{ article | log }}
<li class="article"> ... </li>

Now I had Eleventy logging the entire article object in the terminal! Exactly what I needed.

I tinkered around with returning a <script> from the filter to log on the client too, but that required JSON.stringify() and piping the result into the safe filter. That was more than I wanted to mess with, but there might be a solution there that works for you.

Happy coding!