eleventy-plugin-youtube-embed

This Eleventy plugin automatically embeds responsive YouTube videos from URLs in Markdown files. It’s part of the eleventy-plugin-embed-everything project.

• ⚡️ Installation
• 🛠 Usage
• ⚙️ Settings
• ⚠️ Notes and caveats

⚡️ Installation

In your Eleventy project, install the plugin through npm:

$ npm i eleventy-plugin-youtube-embed

Then add it to your Eleventy config file:

// `require` the package at the top of the file with all the others
const embedYouTube = require("eleventy-plugin-youtube-embed");

module.exports = function(eleventyConfig) {

  // There could be quite a lot of surrounding code here...

  eleventyConfig.addPlugin(embedYouTube);

  // There could be quite a lot of surrounding code here...

};

🛠 Usage

To embed a YouTube video into any Markdown page, paste its URL into a new line. The URL should be the only thing on that line.

Markdown file example:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nam vehicula, elit vel condimentum porta, purus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

Maecenas non velit nibh. Aenean eu justo et odio commodo ornare. In scelerisque sapien at.

Result:

⚙️ Settings

You can configure the plugin to change its behavior by passing an options object to the addPlugin function:

eleventyConfig.addPlugin(embedYouTube, {
  // just an example, see default values below:
  embedClass: 'my-alternate-classname'
});

Plugin default options

The plugin’s default settings reside in lib/defaults.js. All of these values can be changed with an options object passed to the plugin.

Lite YouTube Embed

You can use the Lite YouTube Embed instead of the standard YouTube iframe. In many circumstances this is a performance win because it delays loading the iframe element until the user clicks play.

Be aware that the Lite version defaults to loading two files from the jsDelivr CDN. It loads these files once on any HTML page that includes an embed. You can override both resource URIs if you want to load from a different source, such as unpkg or your own server.

In addition, using the Lite version will cause several of the plugin’s settings to become un-configurable. The embedClass option will still work, but the following options will be ignored if you set lite: true:

• allowAttrs
• allowAutoplay
• allowFullscreen
• lazy
• noCookie
• title and titleOptions

Lite embed options

To use the default Lite version, simply pass lite: true to the options object when you add the plugin to your Eleventy config:

eleventyConfig.addPlugin(embedYouTube, {
  lite: true
});

Configuring lite embed options

To manually configure the Lite version, pass an options object to the lite setting instead of true:

eleventyConfig.addPlugin(embedYouTube, {
  lite: {
    // Change settings here
  }
});

Supported URL patterns

The plugin supports common YouTube URL variants as well. These should also work in your Markdown files.:

<!-- No protocol: -->

youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

<!-- With or without HTTPS: -->

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

<!-- With or without 'www': -->

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
https://youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

<!-- YouTu.be short-links: -->

https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ

<!-- URLs with extra parameters: -->

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQaehcfXvK0&feature=youtu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ&list=RDdQw4w9WgXcQ&start_radio=1&t=1

If you really want to get into the weeds, inspect test/_inc/validUrls.js, which generates the comprehensive list of URL patterns that are explicitly tested. And if you run across a URL pattern that you think should work, but doesn’t, please file an issue!

⚠️ Notes and caveats

• This plugin is deliberately designed only to embed videos when the URL is on its own line, and not inline with other text.
• To do this, it uses a regular expression to recognize YouTube video URLs. Currently these are the limitations on what it can recognize in a Markdown parser’s HTML output:
  • The URL must be wrapped in a paragraph tag: <p>
  • It may also be wrapped in an anchor tag, (inside the paragraph): <a>
  • The URL string may have whitespace around it
• I’ve tried to accommodate common variants (like short youtu.be links, for example), but there are conceivably valid YouTube URLs that wouldn’t get recognized. Please file an issue if you run into an edge case!
• This plugin uses transforms, so it alters Eleventy’s HTML output as it’s generated. It doesn’t alter the source Markdown.
• Right now it supports only single videos, not playlists.
• The embedded video is responsive, using the intrinsic aspect ratio method. It will expand to fill whatever horizontal space is available.
• The embed dimensions are currently hard-coded to a 16:9 aspect ratio.