Navigation Structure

Table of contents

The main navigation for your Just the Docs site is on the left side of the page on large screens and on the top (behind a tap) on small screens. The main navigation can be structured to accommodate a multi-level menu system (pages with children and grandchildren).

By default, all pages will appear as top level pages in the main nav unless a parent page is defined (see Pages with Children).

Ordering pages

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

Example (ordering pages)

---
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. Pages with numerical nav_order parameters always come before those with string nav_order parameters. When you omit nav_order parameters, they default to the titles of the pages. If you want to make the page order independent of the page titles, you can set explicit nav_order parameters on all pages. All pages with explicit nav_order parameters come before all pages ordered by their title values.

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. Enclosing strings in (single or double) quotation marks is optional. Numeric values are not enclosed in quotation marks, e.g., 42, -1.0; numbers in quotation marks are lexicographically ordered, so "10" comes before "2", for example.

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, use the nav_exclude: true parameter in the YAML front matter for that page.

Example (excluding pages)

---
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 main navigation.

Pages with children

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

+-- ..
|-- (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)
+-- ..

On the parent pages, add this YAML front matter parameter:

  • has_children: true (tells us that this is a parent page)

Example (parent pages)

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

Here we’re setting up the UI Components landing page that is available at /docs/ui-components, which has children and is ordered second in the main nav.

Child pages

On child pages, simply set the parent: YAML front matter to whatever the parent’s page title is and set a nav order (this number is now scoped within the section).

Example (child pages)

---
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 section.

Ordering child pages

New (v0.4.0)

You can optionally add the following to the YAML front matter to reverse the default sort order of child pages:

  • child_nav_order: reversed

Example (ordering child pages)

---
layout: default
title: Reversed Child Pages
child_nav_order: reversed
---

Auto-generating Table of Contents

By default, all pages with children will automatically append a Table of Contents which lists the child pages after the parent page’s content. To disable this auto Table of Contents, set has_toc: false in the parent page’s YAML front matter.

Example (auto-generating Table of Contents)

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

Children with children

Child pages can also have children (grandchildren). This is achieved by using a similar pattern on the child and grandchild pages.

  1. Add the has_children attribute to the child
  2. Add the parent and grand_parent attribute to the grandchild
Example (children within children)
---
layout: default
title: Buttons
parent: UI Components
nav_order: 2
has_children: true
---


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

This would create the following navigation structure:

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

Currently, the navigation structure is limited to 3 levels: grandchild pages cannot themselves have child pages.

Grouping pages with collections

Pages can also be grouped together by using Jekyll’s and Just the Docs’s collections feature. In contrast to using pages with children, pages grouped by collection are grouped by a shared header (the name of the collection) instead of a page.

The nav_fold configuration option works for collection-grouped pages. For more information, please refer to the collections documentation.

Example (grouping by collection)

The following example sets up two collections, collection-one and collection-two:

  • any document placed within _collection-1/ will be grouped under the Collection One header by default. Since nav_fold is set to true, the pages will be folded by default.
  • any document placed within _collection-2/ will be grouped under the Collection Two header by default. Since nav_fold is set to false, the pages will be expanded by default.
_config.yml:
  collections:
    collection-one:
      permalink: "/:collection/:path/"
      output: true
    collection-two:
      permalink: "/:collection/:path/"
      output: true
  just_the_docs:
    collections:
      collection-one:
        name: Collection One
        nav_fold: true
      collection-two:
        name: Collection Two
        nav_fold: false

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.

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

New (v0.4.0)

To add external links to the navigation, add them to the nav_external_links configuration option in your site’s _config.yml file. External links will appear in the navigation after the links to ordinary pages, but before any collections.

# External navigation links
nav_external_links:
  - title: Just the Docs on GitHub
    url: https://github.com/just-the-docs/just-the-docs
    hide_icon: false # set to true to hide the external link icon - defaults to false
    opens_in_new_tab: false # set to true to open this link in a new tab - defaults to false

New (unreleased)

The external links are decorated by an icon, which distinguishes them from internal links. You can suppress the icon by setting hide_icon: true.

By default, external links are not opened in a new tab. However, this can be enabled by:

  1. setting opens_in_new_tab: true in the link’s configuration object
  2. setting the configuration option nav_external_links_new_tab: true in _config.yml

When they conflict, opens_in_new_tab takes precedence.

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 (in-page navigation with Table of Contents)

# 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 (expands 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 ({:toc} can be used only once on each page).