Collection archive in Eleventy

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When creating collections, like I am with these notes, it's expected to have an index file of all the posts. All my notes are under the /notes/ url path, but by default the /notes/ url path itself isn't available. And creating a file in the notes folder in the Eleventy project won't fix this, because this will create a new note by itself. Nicolas Hoizey pointed out on Twitter that it is possible, more on that at the end of this note.

Luckily it's pretty easy to create such an index file using the permalink option in the frontmatter. This option enables you to control the location of the created file. In my case I wanted to create an index file for all my notes, so I created the file notes-archive.njk in the root directory of my project with the following frontmatter: 

---
layout: layout.liquid
permalink: /notes/
---

As you can see the permalink option has the /notes/ value, which means the file will be created at that url path, instead of the default /notes-archive/ url path. That's all there is to it to create a basic collection archive or tag page. More information can be found in the Eleventy documentation.

Update March 18, 2021

As I mentioned earlier, it has been brought to my attention that it is possible to create an index file in the /notes/ folder. To make this work you have to use the eleventyExcludeFromCollections option in the frontmatter and set this to true, like this:

---
layout: layout.liquid
eleventyExcludeFromCollections: true
---

The option is pretty self explanatory. If you add this to the frontmatter and set it to true, it won't be added to the collection. I think this is a better solution, because the structuring of the files in your project is much more logical. So both methods work, but I would suggest using this last method.