Navigation and Menus

Customize site navigation for your Docsy site.

9 minute read

Docsy provides multiple built-in navigation features for your sites, including site menus, section menus, and page menus. This page shows you how they work and how to configure and customize them to meet your needs.

The top level menu (the one that appears in the top navigation bar for the entire site) uses your site’s main menu. All Hugo sites have a main menu array of menu entries, accessible via the .Site.Menus site variable and populatable via page front matter or your site’s hugo.toml/hugo.yaml/hugo.json.

To add a page or section to this menu, add it to the site’s main menu in either hugo.toml/hugo.yaml/hugo.json or in the destination page’s front matter (in _index.md or _index.html for a section, as that’s the section landing page). For example, here’s how we added the Documentation section landing page to the main menu in this site:

+++
title = "Welcome to Docsy"
linkTitle = "Documentation"

[menu.main]
weight = 20
pre = "<i class='fa-solid fa-book'></i>"
+++

---
title: "Welcome to Docsy"
linkTitle: "Documentation"
menu:
  main:
    weight: 20
    pre: <i class='fa-solid fa-book'></i>
---

{
  "title": "Welcome to Docsy",
  "linkTitle": "Documentation",
  "menu": {
    "main": {
      "weight": 20,
      "pre": "<i class='fa-solid fa-book'></i>"
    }
  }
}

The menu is ordered from left to right by page weight. So, for example, a section index or page with weight: 30 would appear after the Documentation section in the menu, while one with weight: 10 would appear before it.

If you want to add a link to an external site to this menu, add it in hugo.toml/hugo.yaml/hugo.json, specifying the weight.

[[menu.main]]
    name = "GitHub"
    weight = 50
    url = "https://github.com/google/docsy/"

menu:
  main:
    - name: GitHub
      weight: 50
      url: 'https://github.com/google/docsy/'

{
  "menu": {
    "main": [
      {
        "name": "GitHub",
        "weight": 50,
        "url": "https://github.com/google/docsy/"
      }
    ]
  }
}

As described in the Hugo docs, you can add icons to the top-level menu by using the pre and/or post parameter for main menu items defined in your site’s hugo.toml/hugo.yaml/hugo.json or via page front matter. For example, the following configuration adds the GitHub icon to the GitHub menu item, and a New! alert to indicate that this is a new addition to the menu.

[[menu.main]]
    name = "GitHub"
    weight = 50
    url = "https://github.com/google/docsy/"
    pre = "<i class='fa-brands fa-github'></i>"
    post = "<span class='alert'>New!</span>"

menu:
  main:
    - name: GitHub
      weight: 50
      url: 'https://github.com/google/docsy/'
      pre: <i class='fa-brands fa-github'></i>
      post: <span class='alert'>New!</span>

{
  "menu": {
    "main": [
      {
        "name": "GitHub",
        "weight": 50,
        "url": "https://github.com/google/docsy/",
        "pre": "<i class='fa-brands fa-github'></i>",
        "post": "<span class='alert'>New!</span>"
      }
    ]
  }
}

You can find a complete list of icons to use in the FontAwesome documentation. Docsy includes the free FontAwesome icons by default.

Adding a version drop-down

If you add some [params.versions] in hugo.toml, the Docsy theme adds a version selector drop down to the top-level menu.

You can find out more in the guide to versioning your docs.

Adding a language drop-down

If you configure more than one language in hugo.toml, the Docsy theme adds a language selector drop down to the top-level menu. Selecting a language takes the user to the translated version of the current page, or the home page for the given language.

You can find out more in Multi-language support.

The section menu, as shown in the left side of the docs section, is automatically built from the content tree. Like the top-level menu, it is ordered by page or section index weight (or by page creation date if weight is not set), with the page or index’s Title, or linkTitle if different, as its link title in the menu. If a section subfolder has pages other than _index.md or _index.html, those pages will appear as a submenu, again ordered by weight. For example, here’s the metadata for this page showing its weight and title:

+++
title = "Navigation and Search"
linkTitle = "Navigation and Search"
date = 2017-01-05T00:00:00.000Z
weight = 3
description = '''
Customize site navigation and search for your Docsy site.
'''
+++

---
title: "Navigation and Search"
linkTitle: "Navigation and Search"
date: 2017-01-05
weight: 3
description: >
  Customize site navigation and search for your Docsy site.  
---

{
  "title": "Navigation and Search",
  "linkTitle": "Navigation and Search",
  "date": "2017-01-05T00:00:00.000Z",
  "weight": 3,
  "description": "Customize site navigation and search for your Docsy site.\n"
}

To hide a page or section from the left navigation menu, set toc_hide: true in the front matter.

To hide a page from the section summary on a docs section landing page, set hide_summary: true in the front matter. If you want to hide a page from both the TOC menu and the section summary list, you need to set both toc_hide and hide_summary to true in the front matter.

+++
title = "My Hidden Page"
weight = 99
toc_hide = true
hide_summary = true
description = '''
Page hidden from both the TOC menu and the section summary list.
'''
+++

---
title: "My Hidden Page"
weight: 99
toc_hide: true
hide_summary: true
description: >
  Page hidden from both the TOC menu and the section summary list.  
---

{
  "title": "My Hidden Page",
  "weight": 99,
  "toc_hide": true,
  "hide_summary": true,
  "description": "Page hidden from both the TOC menu and the section summary list.\n"
}

By default, the section menu shows the current section fully expanded all the way down. This may make the left nav too long and difficult to scan for bigger sites. Try setting site parameter ui.sidebar_menu_compact = true in hugo.toml.

With the compact menu (.ui.sidebar_menu_compact = true), only the current page’s ancestors, siblings and direct descendants are shown. You can use the optional parameter .ui.ul_show to set a desired menu depth to always be visible. For example, with .ui.ul_show = 1 the first menu level is always displayed.

As well as the completely expanded and compact menu options, you can also create a foldable menu by setting the site parameter ui.sidebar_menu_foldable = true in hugo.toml. The foldable menu lets users expand and collapse menu sections by toggling arrow icons beside the section parents in the menu.

On large sites (default: > 2000 pages) the section menu is not generated for each page, but cached for the whole section. The HTML classes for marking the active menu item (and menu path) are then set using JS. You can adjust the limit for activating the cached section menu with the optional parameter .ui.sidebar_cache_limit.

The tabbed pane below lists the menu section options you can define in your project [configuration file].

[params.ui]
sidebar_menu_compact = true
ul_show = 1
sidebar_menu_foldable = true
sidebar_cache_limit = 1000

params:
  ui:
    sidebar_menu_compact: true
    ul_show: 1
    sidebar_menu_foldable: true
    sidebar_cache_limit: 1000

{
  "params": {
    "ui": {
      "sidebar_menu_compact": true,
      "ul_show": 1,
      "sidebar_menu_foldable": true,
      "sidebar_cache_limit": 1000,
    }
  }
}

You can add icons to the section menu in the sidebar by setting the icon parameter in the page front matter (e.g. icon: fa-solid fa-screwdriver-wrench).

You can find a complete list of icons to use in the FontAwesome documentation. Docsy includes the free FontAwesome icons by default.

Out of the box, if you want to use icons, you should define icons for all items on the same menu level in order to ensure an appropriate look. If the icons are used in a different way, individual CSS adjustments are likely necessary.

By default the section menu is entirely generated from your section’s pages. If you want to add a manual link to this menu, such as a link to an external site or a page in a different section of your site, you can do this by creating a placeholder page file in the doc hierarchy with the appropriate weight and some special parameters in its metadata (frontmatter) to specify the link details.

To create a placeholder page, create a page file as usual in the directory where you want the link to show up in the menu, and add a manualLink parameter to its metadata. If a page has manualLink in its metadata, Docsy generates a link for it in the section menu for this page and in the section index (the list of the child pages of a section on a landing page - see description in the Docsy docs), but the link destination is replaced by the value of manualLink. The link text is the title (or linkTitle if set) of your placeholder page. You can optionally also set the title attribute of the link with the parameter manualLinkTitle and a link target with manualLinkTarget - for example if you want an external link to open in a new tab you can set the link target to _blank. Docsy automatically adds rel=noopener to links that open new tabs as a security best practice.

You can also use manualLink to add an additional cross reference to another existing page of your site. For internal links you can choose to use the parameter manualLinkRelref instead of manualLink to use the built-in Hugo function relref. If relref can’t find a unique page in your site, Hugo throws a error message.

Note

Although all generated menu and landing page links based on your placeholder file are set according to the parameters manualLink or manualLinkRelref, Hugo still generates a regular HTML site page for the file, albeit one with no generated links to it. To avoid confusion if users accidentally land on a generated placeholder page, we recommend specifying the URL for the external link in the normal content and / or page description of the page.

Breadcrumb navigation links appear at the top of each page by default. To disable breadcrumb navigation, set site param ui.breadcrumb_disable = true in hugo.toml.

Breadcrumb navigation links are also shown for each item on the taxonomy results page (i.e. when you click one of the taxonomy labels, e.g. Tags/Categories). These breadcrumbs can be disabled in hugo.toml by setting site param ui.taxonomy_breadcrumb_disable = true.

The tabbed pane below lists the breadcrumb navigation options you can define in your project [configuration file].

[params.ui]
breadcrumb_disable = true
taxonomy_breadcrumb_disable = true

params:
  ui:
    breadcrumb_disable: true
    taxonomy_breadcrumb_disable: true

{
  "params": {
    "ui": {
      "breadcrumb_disable": true,
      "taxonomy_breadcrumb_disable": true
    }
  }
}

Navigation and Menus

Top-level menu

Adding icons to the top-level menu

Adding a version drop-down

Adding a language drop-down

Section menu

Section menu options

Add icons to the section menu

Add manual links to the section menu

Note