Meet Quesby: A Privacy-First Eleventy Starter That Stays Out of Your Way

I've always loved static site generators.

But every time I wanted to spin up a small, focused site, I kept hitting the same problems:

• Boilerplates full of stuff I didn't ask for
• Too many external dependencies
• Complex setups just to publish a few pages or blog posts

So I ended up building my own starter – and that's how Quesby was born.

(Pronounced /ˈkiːz.bi/, like "keys-bee".)

Quesby is the boilerplate that powers my own site at quesby.dev, and now it's open for you to use too.

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What Quesby Is

Quesby is a modern Eleventy boilerplate with a privacy-first mindset, Decap CMS integration, and a tiny core you can actually understand.

It's a clean starting point for content-driven sites where you still stay in control.

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Who Quesby Is For

You might like Quesby if you:

• Enjoy Eleventy but don't want to wire everything from scratch every time
• Care about performance and privacy by default
• Prefer small, composable building blocks over big frameworks
• Want a starter that's production-ready, not just a demo repo

If you're happy with a giant meta-framework that does everything for you, Quesby isn't trying to compete with that.

It's for people who like to keep things close to the metal, with a little help.

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Why I Built It

I wanted a starter that:

• Respects visitors – no tracking pixels, no analytics you didn't explicitly add
• Respects developers – no 20 layers of abstraction just to render a page
• Respects content creators – a simple CMS flow instead of “open a Markdown file and hope you don’t break the front matter”

Under the hood, Quesby uses a reusable core (@quesby/core) so the project logic isn't scattered everywhere.

That means you can reuse the same core across multiple sites and keep things consistent.

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What You Actually Get

Out of the box, Quesby ships with:

• Eleventy 3.0 for static site generation

• A small CLI, for example:
  
  npx quesby new post "My First Quesby Post"
  
  Generates a properly structured post with front matter, date, and a sane folder name.

• A modular theme system (comes with a couple of themes you can swap or customize)

• SEO basics (sitemap, meta tags, etc.)

• Privacy-first defaults – nothing gets injected behind your back

• Optional CMS integration (Decap)

But the most important part: the codebase is meant to be readable.

If you like to open files, understand what's going on, and tweak things, Quesby is on your side.

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How to Try It

The fastest way to play with it:

npx create-quesby my-site

cd my-site

Install dependencies (uses pnpm under the hood):

npm install -g pnpm@9

pnpm install

Launch the server with auto-reload:

pnpm serve

Then open http://localhost:8080 and start tweaking.

If you prefer details and alternative setups (Corepack, etc.), they're all in the repository README.

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Links

• Quesby Boilerplate: npm @quesby/boilerplate · GitHub quesby/quesby-boilerplate
• Quesby Core: npm @quesby/core · GitHub quesby/quesby-core
• Site built with Quesby: quesby.dev
• Documentation: quesby.dev/docs

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I built Quesby because I needed a starter that stayed out of the way, respected users' privacy, and still felt nice to work in.

If that sounds like something you'd enjoy, feedback, issues, or PRs are welcome — or just a comment telling me what you'd build with it.