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Version: Canary 🚧

Sidebar items

We have introduced three types of item types in the example in the previous section: doc, category, and link, whose usages are fairly intuitive. We will formally introduce their APIs. There's also a fourth type: autogenerated, which we will explain in detail later.

  • Doc: link to a doc page, associating it with the sidebar
  • Link: link to any internal or external page
  • Category: creates a dropdown of sidebar items
  • Autogenerated: generate a sidebar slice automatically
  • HTML: renders pure HTML in the item's position
  • *Ref: link to a doc page, without making the item take part in navigation generation

Use the doc type to link to a doc page and assign that doc to a sidebar:

type SidebarItemDoc =
  // Normal syntax
  | {
      type: 'doc';
      id: string;
      label: string; // Sidebar label text
      className?: string; // Class name for sidebar label
      customProps?: Record<string, unknown>; // Custom props
    }

  // Shorthand syntax
  | string; // docId shortcut

Example:

sidebars.js
module.exports = {
  mySidebar: [
    // Normal syntax:
    {
      type: 'doc',
      id: 'doc1', // document ID
      label: 'Getting started', // sidebar label
    },

    // Shorthand syntax:
    'doc2', // document ID
  ],
};

If you use the doc shorthand or autogenerated sidebar, you would lose the ability to customize the sidebar label through item definition. You can, however, use the sidebar_label Markdown front matter within that doc, which has higher precedence over the label key in the sidebar item. Similarly, you can use sidebar_custom_props to declare custom metadata for a doc page.

:::note

A doc item sets an implicit sidebar association. Don't assign the same doc to multiple sidebars: change the type to ref instead.

:::

:::tip

Sidebar custom props is a useful way to propagate arbitrary doc metadata to the client side, so you can get additional information when using any doc-related hook that fetches a doc object.

:::

Use the link type to link to any page (internal or external) that is not a doc.

type SidebarItemLink = {
  type: 'link';
  label: string;
  href: string;
  className?: string;
};

Example:

sidebars.js
module.exports = {
  myLinksSidebar: [
    // External link
    {
      type: 'link',
      label: 'Facebook', // The link label
      href: 'https://facebook.com', // The external URL
    },

    // Internal link
    {
      type: 'link',
      label: 'Home', // The link label
      href: '/', // The internal path
    },
  ],
};

Use the html type to render custom HTML within the item's <li> tag.

This can be useful for inserting custom items such as dividers, section titles, ads, and images.

type SidebarItemHtml = {
  type: 'html';
  value: string;
  defaultStyle?: boolean; // Use default menu item styles
  className?: string;
};

Example:

sidebars.js
module.exports = {
  myHtmlSidebar: [
    {
      type: 'html',
      value: '<img src="sponsor.png" alt="Sponsor" />', // The HTML to be rendered
      defaultStyle: true, // Use the default menu item styling
    },
  ],
};

:::tip

The menu item is already wrapped in an <li> tag, so if your custom item is simple, such as a title, just supply a string as the value and use the className property to style it:

sidebars.js
module.exports = {
  myHtmlSidebar: [
    {
      type: 'html',
      value: 'Core concepts',
      className: 'sidebar-title',
    },
  ],
};

:::

Use the category type to create a hierarchy of sidebar items.

type SidebarItemCategory = {
  type: 'category';
  label: string; // Sidebar label text.
  items: SidebarItem[]; // Array of sidebar items.
  className?: string;

  // Category options:
  collapsible: boolean; // Set the category to be collapsible
  collapsed: boolean; // Set the category to be initially collapsed or open by default
  link: SidebarItemCategoryLinkDoc | SidebarItemCategoryLinkGeneratedIndex;
};

Example:

sidebars.js
module.exports = {
  docs: [
    {
      type: 'category',
      label: 'Guides',
      collapsible: true,
      collapsed: false,
      items: [
        'creating-pages',
        {
          type: 'category',
          label: 'Docs',
          items: ['introduction', 'sidebar', 'markdown-features', 'versioning'],
        },
      ],
    },
  ],
};

:::tip

Use the shorthand syntax when you don't need customizations:

sidebars.js
module.exports = {
  docs: {
    Guides: [
      'creating-pages',
      {
        Docs: ['introduction', 'sidebar', 'markdown-features', 'versioning'],
      },
    ],
  },
};

:::

With category links, clicking on a category can navigate you to another page.

:::tip

Use category links to introduce a category of documents.

Autogenerated categories can use the _category_.yml file to declare the link.

:::

Generated index page​

You can auto-generate an index page that displays all the direct children of this category. The slug allows you to customize the generated page's route, which defaults to /category/[categoryName].

sidebars.js
module.exports = {
  docs: [
    {
      type: 'category',
      label: 'Guides',
      link: {
        type: 'generated-index',
        title: 'Docusaurus Guides',
        description: 'Learn about the most important Docusaurus concepts!',
        slug: '/category/docusaurus-guides',
        keywords: ['guides'],
        image: '/img/docusaurus.png',
      },
      items: ['pages', 'docs', 'blog', 'search'],
    },
  ],
};

See it in action on the Docusaurus Guides page.

:::tip

Use generated-index links as a quick way to get an introductory document.

:::

A category can link to an existing document.

sidebars.js
module.exports = {
  docs: [
    {
      type: 'category',
      label: 'Guides',
      link: {type: 'doc', id: 'introduction'},
      items: ['pages', 'docs', 'blog', 'search'],
    },
  ],
};

See it in action on the i18n introduction page.

Embedding generated index in doc page​

You can embed the generated cards list in a normal doc page as well with the DocCardList component. It will display all the sidebar items of the parent category of the current document.

docs/sidebar/index.md
import DocCardList from '@theme/DocCardList';

<DocCardList />
http://localhost:3000

Collapsible categories​

We support the option to expand/collapse categories. Categories are collapsible by default, but you can disable collapsing with collapsible: false.

sidebars.js
module.exports = {
  docs: [
    {
      type: 'category',
      label: 'Guides',
      items: [
        'creating-pages',
        {
          type: 'category',
          collapsible: false,
          label: 'Docs',
          items: ['introduction', 'sidebar', 'markdown-features', 'versioning'],
        },
      ],
    },
  ],
};

To make all categories non-collapsible by default, set the sidebarCollapsible option in plugin-content-docs to false:

docusaurus.config.js
module.exports = {
  presets: [
    [
      '@docusaurus/preset-classic',
      {
        docs: {
          sidebarCollapsible: false,
        },
      },
    ],
  ],
};

:::note

The option in sidebars.js takes precedence over plugin configuration, so it is possible to make certain categories collapsible when sidebarCollapsible is set to false globally.

:::

Expanded categories by default​

Collapsible categories are collapsed by default. If you want them to be expanded on the first render, you can set collapsed to false:

sidebars.js
module.exports = {
  docs: {
    Guides: [
      'creating-pages',
      {
        type: 'category',
        label: 'Docs',
        collapsed: false,
        items: ['markdown-features', 'sidebar', 'versioning'],
      },
    ],
  },
};

Similar to collapsible, you can also set the global configuration options.sidebarCollapsed to false. Individual collapsed options in sidebars.js will still take precedence over this configuration.

docusaurus.config.js
module.exports = {
  presets: [
    [
      '@docusaurus/preset-classic',
      {
        docs: {
          sidebarCollapsed: false,
        },
      },
    ],
  ],
};

:::caution

When a category has collapsed: true but collapsible: false (either through sidebars.js or through plugin configuration), the latter takes precedence and the category is still rendered as expanded.

:::

Using shorthands​

You can express typical sidebar items without much customization more concisely with shorthand syntaxes. There are two parts to this: doc shorthand and category shorthand.

Doc shorthand​

An item with type doc can be simply a string representing its ID:

sidebars.js
module.exports = {
  sidebar: [
    {
      type: 'doc',
      id: 'myDoc',
    },
  ],
};

So it's possible to simplify the example above to:

sidebars.js
module.exports = {
  mySidebar: [
    {
      type: 'category',
      label: 'Getting Started',
      items: [
        'doc1',
      ],
    },
    {
      type: 'category',
      label: 'Docusaurus',
      items: [
        'doc2',
        'doc3',
      ],
    },
    {
      type: 'link',
      label: 'Learn more',
      href: 'https://example.com',
    },
  ],
};

Category shorthand​

A category item can be represented by an object whose key is its label, and the value is an array of subitems.

sidebars.js
module.exports = {
  sidebar: [
    {
      type: 'category',
      label: 'Getting started',
      items: ['doc1', 'doc2'],
    },
  ],
};

This permits us to simplify that example to:

sidebars.js
module.exports = {
  mySidebar: [
    {
      'Getting started': ['doc1'],
    },
    {
      Docusaurus: ['doc2', 'doc3'],
    },
    {
      type: 'link',
      label: 'Learn more',
      href: 'https://example.com',
    },
  ],
};

Each shorthand object after this transformation will contain exactly one entry. Now consider the further simplified example below:

sidebars.js
module.exports = {
  mySidebar: [
    {
      'Getting started': ['doc1'],
      Docusaurus: ['doc2', 'doc3'],
    },
    {
      type: 'link',
      label: 'Learn more',
      href: 'https://example.com',
    },
  ],
};

Note how the two consecutive category shorthands are compressed into one object with two entries. This syntax generates a sidebar slice: you shouldn't see that object as one bulk item—this object is unwrapped, with each entry becoming a separate item, and they spliced together with the rest of the items (in this case, the "Learn more" link) to form the final sidebar level. Sidebar slices are also important when discussing autogenerated sidebars.

Wherever you have an array of items that is reduced to one category shorthand, you can omit that enclosing array as well.

sidebars.js
module.exports = {
  sidebar: [
    {
      'Getting started': ['doc1'],
      Docusaurus: [
        {
          'Basic guides': ['doc2', 'doc3'],
          'Advanced guides': ['doc4', 'doc5'],
        },
      ],
    },
  ],
};