Skip to navigation Skip to main content

Eleventy Core Dependency Watch (2025 Edition)

In our quest for smoother long term maintenance and hardened security footprint, we wanted to let folks know that we’ve made even more exciting dependency simplification improvements on the v4 canary prereleases!

Notably when comparing v4.0.0-alpha.6 to v3.1.2, we’ve:

  • Reduced our total dependency count from 134 to 105 (21.6%)
  • Dropped third-party dependency count from 123 to 89 (27.6%)
  • Decreased node_modules weight from 21 MiB to 14 MiB (33.3%)

Full History

Here’s how things have looked over the full length of the project:

Version Deps (3rd-party) Change node_modules Size Change
v0.2.0 (2018 January) First npm release! ×401 (400) - 51 MiB -
v0.12.1 (2021 March) ×362 (360) 9.7% 68 MiB 33.3%
v1.0.2 (2022 August) ×360 (357) 0.5% 71 MiB 4.4%
v2.0.1 (2023 March) ×213 (208) 40.8% 35 MiB 50.7%
v3.0.0 (2024 October) ×187 (174) 12.2% 27 MiB 22.8%
v3.1.2 (2025 June) ×134 (123) 28.3% 21 MiB 22.2%
v4.0.0-alpha.1 (2025 July) ×130 (116) 2.9% 16 MiB 23.8%
v4.0.0-alpha.6 (2025 December) ×105 (89) 19.2% 14 MiB 12.5%
  • Numbers were compiled via fresh install of Eleventy core in a new directory (with npm@11.7.0 and Node v24.11.1).
  • npm ls --omit=dev --all --parseable | wc -l provided the dependency count (minus one for the root directory).
  • node_modules folder sizes via du -m node_modules.

Read more blog posts: