Sidebar

To have a sidebar visible on the side of the page (like on this one for example) or on mobile devices as an off-canvas navigation, you are required to do some global configuration, as well as some configuration per Markdown file.

Global Configuration

Open the gridsome.config.js. The configuration for the sidebar is located under settings > sidebar.

// gridsome.config.js
module.exports = {
  // ...
  settings: {
    sidebar: [],
  },
  // ...
};

Please note that the sidebar option is an array, since you can define multiple sidebars for different sections of your site. For example you might have a sidebar for your guide and another one for your API reference.

The Sidebar Config Object

A single item in this array needs to have the following properties:

• name: The identifier of the sidebar. This will be referenced in your Markdown frontmatter.
• sections: The sidebar is divided into several sections. On this page we have Getting Started and Configuration

// gridsome.config.js
module.exports = {
  // ...
  settings: {
    sidebar: [
      {
        name: "docs",
        sections: [],
      },
    ],
  },
  // ...
};

An item for the sections array might look like this:

// gridsome.config.js
module.exports = {
  // ...
  settings: {
    sidebar: [
      {
        name: "docs",
        sections: [
          {
            title: "Getting Started",
            items: ["/docs/", "/docs/installation/", "/docs/writing-content/"],
          },
        ],
      },
    ],
  },
  // ...
};

As you can see, we need a title for the sections, as well as an array of items which are the links to the given pages.

The sidebar performs a static query to get all pages. This is how we automatically put the title of the given page in the sidebar.

Frontmatter setup

After your global configuration is all done, we only need to tell the Markdown page which sidebar to use.

To do that we simply reference the name of the sidebar in our frontmatter:

---
sidebar: "docs"
---

# I use the docs sidebar