Navigation Structure

Main navigation

The main navigation for your Just the Docs site is at the left side of the page on large screens, and at the top (behind a tap) on small screens. It can be structured to accommodate a multi-level menu of unlimited depth: pages can always have child pages.

By default, links to all pages appear in the main navigation at the top level, ordered alphabetically by page title. By adding fields to the YAML front matter of individual pages, you can change their order, exclude pages, and display pages as children to any depth.

Additional navigation features include auxiliary links at the top of the page, and in-page navigation with an automatically-generated table of contents.

If your site has pages with the same title, you need to avoid confusion when you reference that title on other pages. For the construction of the navigation display to work (and to avoid potential confusion when browsing) your page titles need to satisfy the following requirements:

• Top-level pages cannot have the same title.
• Children of the same parent cannot have the same title.
• A child cannot have the same title as its parent or any of its ancestors.

You can disambiguate references to parent titles in several ways. If two potential parents have the same title, but different grandparents, you can use the grandparent titles to identify the intended parent. For deeper navigation structures, you can also use the titles of more remote ancestors. And if you want the same navigation structure in different parts of the website, you can add section identifiers (which are not displayed).

Ordering pages

To specify a page order, you can use the nav_order parameter in your pages’ YAML front matter.

Example

---
layout: default
title: Customization
nav_order: 4
---

The parameter values determine the order of the top-level pages, and of child pages with the same parent. You can reuse the same parameter values (e.g., integers starting from 1) for the child pages of different parents.

The parameter values can be numbers (integers, floats) and/or strings. When you omit nav_order parameters, they default to the titles of the pages, which are ordered alphabetically. Pages with numerical nav_order parameters always come before those with strings or default nav_order parameters. If you want to make the page order independent of the page titles, you can set explicit nav_order parameters on all pages.

By default, all Capital letters come before all lowercase letters; you can add nav_sort: case_insensitive in the configuration file to ignore the case.¹ Enclosing strings in quotation marks is optional.

Excluding pages

For specific pages that you do not wish to include in the main navigation (e.g., a 404 page or a landing page) set nav_exclude: true in the YAML front matter.

Example

---
layout: default
title: 404
nav_exclude: true
---

The nav_exclude parameter does not affect the auto-generating list of child pages, which you can use to access pages excluded from the main navigation.

Pages with no title are automatically excluded from the navigation.

Pages with children

Sometimes you will want to create a page with many children. First, it is recommended that you store related pages together in a directory. For example, in these docs, we keep all of the written documentation pages in the ./docs directory, and each of the sections in subdirectories like ./docs/ui-components and ./docs/utilities. This gives us an organization like this:

+-- ..
|-- (Jekyll files)
|
|-- docs
|   |-- ui-components
|   |   |-- index.md  (parent page)
|   |   |-- buttons.md
|   |   |-- code.md
|   |   |-- labels.md
|   |   |-- tables.md
|   |   +-- typography.md
|   |
|   |-- utilities
|   |   |-- index.md      (parent page)
|   |   |-- color.md
|   |   |-- layout.md
|   |   |-- responsive-modifiers.md
|   |   +-- typography.md
|   |
|   |-- (other md files, pages with no children)
|   +-- ..
|
|-- (Jekyll files)
+-- ..

Example

---
layout: default
title: UI Components
nav_order: 2
---

Here we’re setting up the UI Components landing page that is available at URL /docs/ui-components, which is ordered second in the main navigation.²

By default, the navigation links for all pages with children come with an expander. When you click the expander, the display of the children is toggled, so you can expand or collapse all the children displays, regardless of which page is currently active.

Child pages

On child pages, simply set the parent: YAML front matter to the parent page’s title, and set a navigation order (relative to pages having the same parent).

Example

---
layout: default
title: Buttons
parent: UI Components
nav_order: 2
---

The Buttons page appears as a child of UI Components and appears second in the UI Components pages.

Auto-generating Table of Contents

By default, all parent pages will automatically have a Table of Contents at the bottom, listing their child pages. To disable this automatic Table of Contents, set has_toc: false in the parent page’s YAML front matter.

Example

---
layout: default
title: UI Components
nav_order: 2
has_children: true
has_toc: false
---

Children with children

Child pages can themselves have children, recursively, to any number of levels.

Example

---
layout: default
title: Buttons
parent: UI Components
nav_order: 2
---

---
layout: default
title: Buttons Child Page
parent: Buttons
nav_order: 1
---

This would create the following navigation structure:

+-- ..
|
|-- UI Components
|   |-- ..
|   |
|   |-- Buttons
|   |   |-- Button Child Page
|   |
|   |-- ..
|
+-- ..

Title disambiguation

If no two pages on your website have the same title, you only need to set the parent titles to fix the hierarchy. You can also have the same title on pages that have no children, provided that they have different parent pages.

If two parents have the same title, but different grandparents, you can set their grand_parent titles to distinguish between their parents. The grand_parent title needs to be the same as the parent of the parent.

Example

---
layout: default
title: Buttons Child Page
parent: Buttons
grand_parent: UI Components
nav_order: 1
---

You can use the following techniques for disambiguating titles in deeper navigation structures (or simply instead of grand_parent):

Ancestors

The ancestor field of a page is similar to grand_parent: it refers to a page that can be reached by a succession of parent titles.

Sections

You can choose a unique section identifier (a number or string), and add it as the section_id field of a page. Then use the same identifier for the in_section field of all its descendant pages. If you use a new section_id field inside a section, you create a sub-section.

In contrast to ancestor values, section identifiers are independent of page titles. However, you need to be careful not to set the same section_id value more than once.

Auxiliary Links

To add auxiliary links to your site (in the upper right on all pages), add it to the aux_links configuration option in your site’s _config.yml file.

Example

# Aux links for the upper right navigation
aux_links:
  "Just the Docs on GitHub":
    - "//github.com/pmarsceill/just-the-docs"

In-page navigation with Table of Contents

To generate a Table of Contents on your docs pages, you can use the {:toc} method from Kramdown, immediately after an <ol> in Markdown. This will automatically generate an ordered list of anchor links to various sections of the page based on headings and heading levels. There may be occasions where you’re using a heading and you don’t want it to show up in the TOC, so to skip a particular heading use the {: .no_toc } CSS class.

Example

# Navigation Structure
{: .no_toc }

## Table of contents
{: .no_toc .text-delta }

1. TOC
{:toc}

This example skips the page name heading (#) from the TOC, as well as the heading for the Table of Contents itself (##) because it is redundant, followed by the table of contents itself. To get an unordered list, replace 1. TOC above by - TOC.

Collapsible Table of Contents

The Table of Contents can be made collapsible using the <details> and <summary> elements , as in the following example. The attribute open (to expand the Table of Contents by default) and the styling with {: .text-delta } are optional.

<details open markdown="block">
  <summary>
    Table of contents
  </summary>
  {: .text-delta }
1. TOC
{:toc}
</details>

The result is shown at the top of this page. Note that Kramdown expands {:toc} only once on each page.

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