Skip to main content
Version: Canary 🚧

Autogenerated

Docusaurus can create a sidebar automatically from your filesystem structure: each folder creates a sidebar category, and each file creates a doc link.

type SidebarItemAutogenerated = {
  type: 'autogenerated';
  dirName: string; // Source folder to generate the sidebar slice from (relative to docs)
};

Docusaurus can generate a full sidebar from your docs folder:

sidebars.js
module.exports = {
  myAutogeneratedSidebar: [
    {
      type: 'autogenerated',
      dirName: '.', // '.' means the current docs folder
    },
  ],
};

An autogenerated item is converted by Docusaurus to a sidebar slice (also discussed in category shorthands): a list of items of type doc or category, so you can splice multiple autogenerated items from multiple directories, interleaving them with regular sidebar items, in one sidebar level.

A real-world example
Consider this file structure:
docs
├── api
│   ├── product1-api
│   │   └── api.md
│   └── product2-api
│       ├── basic-api.md
│       └── pro-api.md
├── intro.md
└── tutorials
    ├── advanced
    │   ├── advanced1.md
    │   ├── advanced2.md
    │   └── read-more
    │       ├── resource1.md
    │       └── resource2.md
    ├── easy
    │   ├── easy1.md
    │   └── easy2.md
    ├── tutorial-end.md
    ├── tutorial-intro.md
    └── tutorial-medium.md

And assume every doc's ID is just its file name. If you define an autogenerated sidebar like this:

sidebars.js
module.exports = {
  mySidebar: [
    'intro',
    {
      type: 'category',
      label: 'Tutorials',
      items: [
        'tutorial-intro',
        {
          type: 'autogenerated',
          dirName: 'tutorials/easy', // Generate sidebar slice from docs/tutorials/easy
        },
        'tutorial-medium',
        {
          type: 'autogenerated',
          dirName: 'tutorials/advanced', // Generate sidebar slice from docs/tutorials/advanced
        },
        'tutorial-end',
      ],
    },
    {
      type: 'autogenerated',
      dirName: 'api', // Generate sidebar slice from docs/api
    },
    {
      type: 'category',
      label: 'Community',
      items: ['team', 'chat'],
    },
  ],
};

It would be resolved as:

sidebars.js
module.exports = {
  mySidebar: [
    'intro',
    {
      type: 'category',
      label: 'Tutorials',
      items: [
        'tutorial-intro',
        // Two files in docs/tutorials/easy
        'easy1',
        'easy2',
        'tutorial-medium',
        // Two files and a folder in docs/tutorials/advanced
        'advanced1',
        'advanced2',
        {
          type: 'category',
          label: 'read-more',
          items: ['resource1', 'resource2'],
        },
        'tutorial-end',
      ],
    },
    // Two folders in docs/api
    {
      type: 'category',
      label: 'product1-api',
      items: ['api'],
    },
    {
      type: 'category',
      label: 'product2-api',
      items: ['basic-api', 'pro-api'],
    },
    {
      type: 'category',
      label: 'Community',
      items: ['team', 'chat'],
    },
  ],
};

Note how the autogenerate source directories themselves don't become categories: only the items they contain do. This is what we mean by "sidebar slice".

Category index convention​

Docusaurus can automatically link a category to its index document.

A category index document is a document following one of those filename conventions:

  • Named as index (case-insensitive): docs/Guides/index.md
  • Named as README (case-insensitive): docs/Guides/README.mdx
  • Same name as parent folder: docs/Guides/Guides.md

This is equivalent to using a category with a doc link:

sidebars.js
module.exports = {
  docs: [
    {
      type: 'category',
      label: 'Guides',
      link: {type: 'doc', id: 'Guides/index'},
      items: [],
    },
  ],
};
tip

Naming your introductory document README.md makes it show up when browsing the folder using the GitHub interface, while using index.md makes the behavior more in line with how HTML files are served.

tip

If a folder only has one index page, it will be turned into a link instead of a category. This is useful for asset collocation:

some-doc
├── index.md
├── img1.png
└── img2.png
Customizing category index matching

It is possible to opt out any of the category index conventions, or define even more conventions. You can inject your own isCategoryIndex matcher through the sidebarItemsGenerator callback. For example, you can also pick intro as another file name eligible for automatically becoming the category index.

docusaurus.config.js
module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    [
      '@docusaurus/plugin-content-docs',
      {
        async sidebarItemsGenerator({
          ...args,
          isCategoryIndex: defaultCategoryIndexMatcher, // The default matcher implementation, given below
          defaultSidebarItemsGenerator,
        }) {
          return defaultSidebarItemsGenerator({
            ...args,
            isCategoryIndex(doc) {
              return (
                // Also pick intro.md in addition to the default ones
                doc.fileName.toLowerCase() === 'intro' ||
                defaultCategoryIndexMatcher(doc)
              );
            },
          });
        },
      },
    ],
  ],
};

Or choose to not have any category index convention.

docusaurus.config.js
module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    [
      '@docusaurus/plugin-content-docs',
      {
        async sidebarItemsGenerator({
          ...args,
          isCategoryIndex: defaultCategoryIndexMatcher, // The default matcher implementation, given below
          defaultSidebarItemsGenerator,
        }) {
          return defaultSidebarItemsGenerator({
            ...args,
            isCategoryIndex() {
              // No doc will be automatically picked as category index
              return false;
            },
          });
        },
      },
    ],
  ],
};

The isCategoryIndex matcher will be provided with three fields:

  • fileName, the file's name without extension and with casing preserved
  • directories, the list of directory names from the lowest level to the highest level, relative to the docs root directory
  • extension, the file's extension, with a leading dot.

For example, for a doc file at guides/sidebar/autogenerated.md, the props the matcher receives are

const props = {
  fileName: 'autogenerated',
  directories: ['sidebar', 'guides'],
  extension: '.md',
};

The default implementation is:

function isCategoryIndex({fileName, directories}) {
  const eligibleDocIndexNames = [
    'index',
    'readme',
    directories[0].toLowerCase(),
  ];
  return eligibleDocIndexNames.includes(fileName.toLowerCase());
}

Autogenerated sidebar metadata​

For handwritten sidebar definitions, you would provide metadata to sidebar items through sidebars.js; for autogenerated, Docusaurus would read them from the item's respective file. In addition, you may want to adjust the relative position of each item because, by default, items within a sidebar slice will be generated in alphabetical order (using file and folder names).

Doc item metadata​

The label, className, and customProps attributes are declared in front matter as sidebar_label, sidebar_class_name, and sidebar_custom_props, respectively. Position can be specified in the same way, via sidebar_position front matter.

docs/tutorials/tutorial-easy.md
---
sidebar_position: 2
sidebar_label: Easy
sidebar_class_name: green
---

# Easy Tutorial

This is the easy tutorial!

Category item metadata​

Add a _category_.json or _category_.yml file in the respective folder. You can specify any category metadata and also the position metadata. label, className, position, and customProps will default to the respective values of the category's linked doc, if there is one.

docs/tutorials/_category_.json
{
  "position": 2.5,
  "label": "Tutorial",
  "collapsible": true,
  "collapsed": false,
  "className": "red",
  "link": {
    "type": "generated-index",
    "title": "Tutorial overview"
  },
  "customProps": {
    "description": "This description can be used in the swizzled DocCard"
  }
}
info

If the link is explicitly specified, Docusaurus will not apply any default conventions.

The doc links can be specified relatively, e.g. if the category is generated with the guides directory, "link": {"type": "doc", "id": "intro"} will be resolved to the ID guides/intro, only falling back to intro if a doc with the former ID doesn't exist.

You can also use link: null to opt out of default conventions and not generate any category index page.

info

The position metadata is only used within a sidebar slice: Docusaurus does not re-order other items of your sidebar.

Using number prefixes​

A simple way to order an autogenerated sidebar is to prefix docs and folders by number prefixes, which also makes them appear in the file system in the same order when sorted by file name:

docs
├── 01-Intro.md
├── 02-Tutorial Easy
│   ├── 01-First Part.md
│   ├── 02-Second Part.md
│   └── 03-End.md
├── 03-Tutorial Advanced
│   ├── 01-First Part.md
│   ├── 02-Second Part.md
│   ├── 03-Third Part.md
│   └── 04-End.md
└── 04-End.md

To make it easier to adopt, Docusaurus supports multiple number prefix patterns.

By default, Docusaurus will remove the number prefix from the doc id, title, label, and URL paths.

caution

Prefer using additional metadata.

Updating a number prefix can be annoying, as it can require updating multiple existing Markdown links:

docs/02-Tutorial Easy/01-First Part.md
- Check the [Tutorial End](../04-End.mdx);
+ Check the [Tutorial End](../05-End.mdx);

Customize the sidebar items generator​

You can provide a custom sidebarItemsGenerator function in the docs plugin (or preset) config:

docusaurus.config.js
module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    [
      '@docusaurus/plugin-content-docs',
      {
        async sidebarItemsGenerator({
          defaultSidebarItemsGenerator,
          numberPrefixParser,
          item,
          version,
          docs,
          categoriesMetadata,
          isCategoryIndex,
        }) {
          // Example: return an hardcoded list of static sidebar items
          return [
            {type: 'doc', id: 'doc1'},
            {type: 'doc', id: 'doc2'},
          ];
        },
      },
    ],
  ],
};
tip

Re-use and enhance the default generator instead of writing a generator from scratch: the default generator we provide is 250 lines long.

Add, update, filter, re-order the sidebar items according to your use case:

docusaurus.config.js
// Reverse the sidebar items ordering (including nested category items)
function reverseSidebarItems(items) {
  // Reverse items in categories
  const result = items.map((item) => {
    if (item.type === 'category') {
      return {...item, items: reverseSidebarItems(item.items)};
    }
    return item;
  });
  // Reverse items at current level
  result.reverse();
  return result;
}

module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    [
      '@docusaurus/plugin-content-docs',
      {
        async sidebarItemsGenerator({defaultSidebarItemsGenerator, ...args}) {
          const sidebarItems = await defaultSidebarItemsGenerator(args);
          return reverseSidebarItems(sidebarItems);
        },
      },
    ],
  ],
};