Styling your docs

How to style and theme your documentation.


MkDocs includes a number of different themes which can easily be customised with extra CSS or JavaScript or you can create a custom theme for your documentation.

To use a theme that is included in MkDocs, simply add this to your mkdocs.yml config file.

theme: amelia

Replace amelia with any of the builtin themes listed below.

To customise a theme, simply place additional CSS and JavaScript files in the documentation directory next to the Markdown files and these will be automatically detected and added. Additionally, the extra_css and extra_javascript configuration options can be used to specifically include certain CSS or JavaScript files.

See the configuration documentation for more specific details about these options.

To create a new custom theme or more heavily customise an existing theme, see the custom themes section below.

Built-in themes

MkDocs

mkdocs

Read the Docs

ReadTheDocs

Bootstrap

Bootstrap

The bootswatch themes

Amelia

Amelia

Cerulean

Cerulean

Cosmo

Cosmo

Cyborg

Cyborg

Flatly

Flatly

Journal

Journal

Readable

Readable

Simplex

Simplex

Slate

Slate

Spacelab

Spacelab

United

United

Yeti

Yeti

Custom themes

The bare minimum required for a custom theme is a base.html Jinja2 template file. This should be placed in a directory at the same level as the mkdocs.yml configuration file. Within mkdocs.yml, specify the theme_dir option and set it to the name of the directory containing base.html. For example, given this example project layout:

mkdocs.yml
docs/
    index.md
    about.md
custom_theme/
    base.html
    ...

You would include the following setting to use the custom theme directory:

theme_dir: 'custom_theme'

If used in combination with the theme configuration value a custom theme can be used to replace only specific parts of a built-in theme. For example, with the above layout and if you set theme: mkdocs then the base.html file would replace that in the theme but otherwise it would remain the same. This is useful if you want to make small adjustments to an existing theme.

Basic theme

The simplest base.html file is the following:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
  </head>
  <body>
    {{ content }}
  </body>
</html>

Article content from each page specified in mkdocs.yml is inserted using the {{ content }} tag. Stylesheets and scripts can be brought into this theme as with a normal HTML file. Navbars and tables of contents can also be generated and included automatically, through the nav and toc objects, respectively. If you wish to write your own theme, it is recommended to start with one of the built-in themes and modify it accordingly.

Template Variables

Each template in a theme is built with a template context. These are the variables that are available to themes. The context varies depending on the template that is being built. At the moment templates are either built with the global context or with a page specific context. The global context is used for HTML pages that don't represent an individual Markdown document, for example a 404.html page or search.html.

Global Context

The following variables in the context map directly the the configuration options.

Variable Name Configuration name
site_name site_name
site_author site_author
favicon site_favicon
page_description site_description
repo_url repo_url
repo_name repo_name
site_url site_url
extra_css extra_css
extra_javascript extra_javascript
extra extra
include_nav include_nav
include_next_prev include_next_prev
copyright copyright
google_analytics google_analytics

The following variables provide information about the navigation and location.

The nav variable is used to create the navigation for for the documentation. Following is a basic usage example which outputs the first and second level navigation as a nested list.

<ul>
  {% for nav_item in nav %}
      {% if nav_item.children %}
          <li>{{ nav_item.title }}
              <ul>
              {% for nav_item in nav_item.children %}
                  <li class="{% if nav_item.active%}current{%endif%}">
                      <a href="{{ nav_item.url }}">{{ nav_item.title }}</a>
                  </li>
              {% endfor %}
              </ul>
          </li>
      {% else %}
          <li class="{% if nav_item.active%}current{%endif%}">
              <a href="{{ nav_item.url }}">{{ nav_item.title }}</a>
          </li>
      {% endif %}

  {% endfor %}
</ul>
base_url

The base_url provides a relative path to the root of the MkDocs project. This makes it easy to include links to static assets in your theme. For example, if your theme includes a js folder, to include theme.js from that folder on all pages you would do this:

<script src="{{ base_url }}/js/theme.js"></script>
homepage_url

Provides a relative path to the documentation homepage.

mkdocs_version

Contains the current MkDocs version.

build_date_utc

A Python datetime object that includes represents the time the documentation was built in UTC. This is useful for showing how recently the documentation was updated.

Page Context

The page context includes all of the above Global context and the following additional variables.

page_title

Contains the Title for the current page.

page_description

Contains the description for the current page on the homepage, it is blank on other pages.

content

The rendered Markdown as HTML, this is the contents of the documentation.

toc

An object representing the Table of contents for a page. Displaying the table of contents as a simple list can be achieved like this.

  <ul>
  {% for toc_item in toc %}
      <li><a href="{{ toc_item.url }}">{{ toc_item.title }}</a></li>
      {% for toc_item in toc_item.children %}
          <li><a href="{{ toc_item.url }}">{{ toc_item.title }}</a></li>
      {% endfor %}
  {% endfor %}
  </ul>
meta

A mapping of the metadata included at the top of the markdown page. In this example we define a source property above the page title.

source: generics.py
        mixins.py

# Page title

Content...

A template can access this metadata for the page with the meta.source variable. This could then be used to link to source files related to the documentation page.

{% for filename in meta.source %}
  <a class="github" href="https://github.com/.../{{ filename }}">
    <span class="label label-info">{{ filename }}</span>
  </a>
{% endfor %}
canonical_url

The full, canonical URL to the current page. This includes the site_url from the configuration.

current_page

The page object for the current page. The page path and url properties can be displayed like this.

<h1>{{ current_page.title }}</h1>
<p> This page is at {{ current_page.url }}</p>
previous_page

The page object for the previous page. The isage is the same as for current_page.

next_page

The page object for the next page.The isage is the same as for current_page.

Extra Context

Additional variables can be passed to the template with the extra configuration option. This is a set of key value pairs that can make custom templates far more flexible.

For example, this could be used to include the project version of all pages and a list of links related to the project. This can be achieved with the following extra configuration:

extra:
    version: 0.13.0
    links:
        - https://github.com/mkdocs
        - https://docs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/builds.html#mkdocs
        - http://www.mkdocs.org/

And then displayed with this HTML in the custom theme.

{{ config.extra.version }}

{% if config.extra.links %}
  <ul>
  {% for link in config.extra.links %}
      <li>{{ link }}</li>
  {% endfor %}
  </ul>
{% endif %}

Search and themes

As of MkDocs 0.13 client side search support has been added to MkDocs with Lunr.js.

Search can either be added to every page in the theme or to a dedicated template which must be named search.html. The search template will be build with the same name and can be viewable with mkdocs serve at http://localhost:8000/search.html. An example of the two different approaches can be seen by comparing the mkdocs and readthedocs themes.

The following HTML needs to be added to the theme so the JavaScript is loaded for Lunr.js.

<script>var base_url = '{{ base_url }}';</script>
<script data-main="{{ base_url }}/mkdocs/js/search.js" src="{{ base_url }}/mkdocs/js/require.js"></script>

Note

The above JavaScript will download the search index, for larger documentation projects this can be a heavy operation. In those cases, it is suggested that you either use the search.html approach to only include search on one page or load the JavaScript on an event like a form submit.

This loads the JavaScript and sets a global variable base_url which allows the JavaScript to make the links relative to the current page. The above JavaScript, with the following HTML in a search.html template will add a full search implementation to your theme.

<h1 id="search">Search Results</h1>

<form action="search.html">
  <input name="q" id="mkdocs-search-query" type="text" class="search_input search-query ui-autocomplete-input" placeholder="Search the Docs" autocomplete="off">
</form>

<div id="mkdocs-search-results">
  Sorry, page not found.
</div>

This works by looking for the specific ID's used in the above HTML. The input for the user to type the search query must have the ID mkdocs-search-query and mkdocs-search-results is the directory where the results will be placed.