Version switcher dropdowns#

You can add a button to your site that allows users to switch between versions of your documentation. The links in the version switcher will differ depending on which page of the docs is being viewed. For example, on the page https://mysite.org/en/v2.0/changelog.html, the switcher links will go to changelog.html in the other versions of your docs. When clicked, the switcher will check for the existence of that page, and if it doesn’t exist, will redirect to the homepage instead (in the requested version of the docs).

The switcher requires the following configuration steps:

  1. Add a JSON file containing a list of the documentation versions that the switcher should show on each page.

  2. Add a configuration dictionary called switcher to the html_theme_options dict in conf.py. switcher should have 2 keys:

    • json_url: the persistent location of the JSON file described above.

    • version_match: a string stating the version of the documentation that is currently being browsed.

  3. Specify where to place the switcher in your page layout. For example, add the "version-switcher" template to one of the layout lists in html_theme_options (e.g., navbar_end, footer_start, etc.).

Below is a more in-depth description of each of these configuration steps.

Warning

Modern web browsers do not allow loading data when the request is made from a page loaded via the file: protocol. This means that if you build your documentation locally and then directly open one of its pages in the browser, the version switcher will not be allowed to load its JSON data source and you’ll end up with an empty switcher menu. Possible work-arounds are:

  1. View the locally-built files through a local webserver (Python provides a builtin module for this: https://docs.python.org/3/library/http.server.html).

  2. Disabling your browser’s security settings (either by passing a command-line flag when launching the browser, or through a browser add-on).

Add a JSON file to define your switcher’s versions#

First, write a JSON file stating which versions of your docs will be listed in the switcher’s dropdown menu. That file should contain a list of entries that each can have the following fields:

  • version: a version string. This is checked against switcher['version_match'] to provide styling to the switcher.

  • url: the URL for this version.

  • name: an optional name to display in the switcher dropdown instead of the version string (e.g., “latest”, “stable”, “dev”, etc.).

  • preferred: an optional field that should occur on at most one entry in the JSON file. It specifies which version is considered “latest stable”, and is used to customize the message used on Version warning banners (if they are enabled).

Here is an example JSON file:

[
    {
        "name": "v2.1 (stable)",
        "version": "2.1",
        "url": "https://mysite.org/en/2.1/"
    },
    {
        "version": "2.1rc1",
        "url": "https://mysite.org/en/2.1rc1/"
    },
    {
        "version": "2.0",
        "url": "https://mysite.org/en/2.0/"
    },
    {
        "version": "1.0",
        "url": "https://mysite.org/en/1.0/"
    }
]

See the discussion of switcher['json_url'] (below) for options of where to save the JSON file.

Configure switcher['json_url']#

The JSON file needs to be at a stable, persistent, fully-resolved URL (i.e., not specified as a path relative to the sphinx root of the current doc build). Each version of your documentation should point to the same URL, so that as new versions are added to the JSON file all the older versions of the docs will gain switcher dropdown entries linking to the new versions. This could be done in a few different ways:

  • The location could be one that is always associated with the most recent documentation build (i.e., if your docs server aliases “latest” to the most recent version, it could point to a location in the build tree of version “latest”). For example:

    html_theme_options = {
    ...,
    "switcher": {
        "json_url": "https://mysite.org/en/latest/_static/switcher.json",
    }
}

    In this case, the JSON is versioned alongside the rest of the docs pages but only the most recent version is ever loaded (even by older versions of the docs).

  • The JSON could be stored outside the doc build trees. This probably means it would be outside the software repo, and would require you to add new version entries to the JSON file manually as part of your release process. Example:

    html_theme_options = {
    ...,
    "switcher": {
        "json_url": "https://mysite.org/switcher.json",
    }
}

  • In theory the JSON could be saved in a folder that is listed under your site’s html_static_path configuration, but this is not recommended. If you want to do it this way, see the Sphinx static path documentation for more information but do so knowing that we do not support this use case.

By default, the theme is testing the .json file provided and outputs warnings in the Sphinx build. If this test breaks the pipeline of your docs, the test can be disabled by configuring the check_switcher parameter in conf.py:

html_theme_options = {
    # ...
    "check_switcher": False
}

Configure switcher['version_match']#

This configuration value tells the switcher what docs version is currently being viewed, and is used to style the switcher (i.e., to highlight the current docs version in the switcher’s dropdown menu, and to change the text displayed on the switcher button).

Typically, you can re-use one of the sphinx variables version or release as the value of switcher['version_match']; which one you use depends on how granular your docs versioning is. See the Sphinx “project info” documentation for more information). Example:

version = my_package_name.__version__.replace("dev0", "")  # may differ
html_theme_options = {
    ...,
    "switcher": {
        "version_match": version,
    }
}

Specify where to display the switcher#

Finally, tell the theme where on your site’s pages you want the switcher to appear. There are many choices here: you can add "version-switcher" to one of the locations in html_theme_options (e.g., navbar_end, footer_start, etc). For example:

html_theme_options = {
   ...,
   "navbar_start": ["navbar-logo", "version-switcher"]
}

Alternatively, you could override one of the other templates to include the version switcher in a sidebar. For example, you could define _templates/sidebar-nav-bs.html as:

{%- include 'version-switcher.html' -%}
{{ super() }}

to insert a version switcher at the top of the primary sidebar, while still keeping the default navigation below it. See Theme Structure and Layout for more information.

Style the switcher buttons#

You may apply styles via CSS to any of the switcher buttons to control their look and feel. Each button has two HTML dataset entries that you can use to apply CSS rules to subsets of buttons. These entries are:

data-version
data-version-name

For example, the link for an entry with version="0.2", and name="My version" would have metadata like so:

<a data-version-name="My version" data-version="0.2" class="<classes...>">

You can create CSS rules that select this metadata like so:

// Style all links with a specific subset of versions
.version-switcher__container a[data-version="0.2"],
.version-switcher__container a[data-version="0.3"] {
   background-color: red;
}
// Style all links with `stable` in the version name
.version-switcher__container a[data-version-name*="stable"] {
   background-color: green;
}

In addition, the parent button of the dropdown list contains similar metadata about the current version. This could be used to style the entire dropdown a certain color based on the active version.

For example, if you wanted to style the dropdown button to use the theme’s secondary color (PyData orange by default) if it was a dev version, you could use the following CSS selector:

// If the active version has the name "dev", style it orange
.version-switcher__button[data-active-version-name*="dev"] {
   background-color: var(--pst-color-secondary);
}

See also

See the MDN documentation on dataset properties for more information on using and styling these properties.