Header links

The header navigation bar is at the top of each page and contains top-level navigation across pages in your documentation, as well as extra links and components that you can add. These sections cover a few things you can control with the Header Navigation Bar.

Navigation Bar External links

You can add external links to your navigation bar. These will show up to the right of your site’s main links and will have a small icon indicating that they point to an external site. You can add external links to the nav bar like so:

html_theme_options = {
  "external_links": [
      {"name": "link-one-name", "url": "https://<link-one>"},
      {"name": "link-two-name", "url": "https://<link-two>"}
  ]
}

Navigation bar dropdown links

By default, this theme will display the first five navigation links in the header (including both top-level links and external links). It will place the remaining header links in a dropdown menu titled “More”. This prevents the header links from taking up so much space that they crowd out the UI components or spill off-screen.

To control how many header links are displayed before being placed in the dropdown, use the header_links_before_dropdown theme configuration variable. For example, to change the number of displayed header links to be 4 instead of 5:

html_theme_options = {
  "header_links_before_dropdown": 4
}

Icon links

Icon links are a collection of images and icons that each link to a page or external site. They are helpful if you wish to display social media icons, GitHub badges, or project logos.

These links take the following form:

html_theme_options = {
    ...
    "icon_links": [
        {
            # Label for this link
            "name": "GitHub",
            # URL where the link will redirect
            "url": "https://github.com/<your-org>/<your-repo>",  # required
            # Icon class (if "type": "fontawesome"), or path to local image (if "type": "local")
            "icon": "fa-brands fa-square-github",
            # The type of image to be used (see below for details)
            "type": "fontawesome",
        }
   ]
}

Additionally, the screen-reader accessible label for this menu can be configured:

html_theme_options = {
    ...
    "icon_links_label": "Quick Links",
    ...
}

There are two kinds of icons you can use, described below:

FontAwesome icons

FontAwesome is a collection of icons that are commonly used in websites. They include both generic shape icons (e.g., “arrow-down”), and brand-specific icons (e.g. “GitHub”).

You can use FontAwesome icons by specifying "type": "fontawesome", and specifying a FontAwesome class in the icon value. The value of icon can be any full FontAwesome 6 Free icon. In addition to the main icon class, e.g. fa-cat, the “style” class must also be provided e.g. fa-brands for branding, or fa-solid for solid.

Here are several examples:

html_theme_options = {
    ...
    "icon_links": [
        {
            "name": "GitHub",
            "url": "https://github.com/<your-org>/<your-repo>",
            "icon": "fa-brands fa-square-github",
            "type": "fontawesome",
        },
        {
            "name": "GitLab",
            "url": "https://gitlab.com/<your-org>/<your-repo>",
            "icon": "fa-brands fa-square-gitlab",
            "type": "fontawesome",
        },
        {
            "name": "Twitter",
            "url": "https://twitter.com/<your-handle>",
            "icon": "fa-brands fa-square-twitter",
            # The default for `type` is `fontawesome`, so it is not required in the above examples
        },
        {
            "name": "Mastodon",
            "url": "https://<your-host>@<your-handle>",
            "icon": "fa-brands fa-mastodon",
        },
    ],
    ...
}

Hint

To get custom colors like “Twitter blue”, use the following in your CSS, e.g. custom.css:

i.fa-twitter-square:before {
   color: #55acee;
}

This has already been added for the brands that have shortcuts (see below).

Image icons

If you’d like to display an icon image that is not in the FontAwesome icons library, you may instead specify a URL or a path to a local image that will be used for the icon.

To display an image on the web, use "type": "url", and provide a URL to an image in the icon value. For example:

html_theme_options = {
    ...
    "icon_links": [
        {
            "name": "Pandas",
            "url": "https://pandas.pydata.org",
            "icon": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pydata/pydata-sphinx-theme/main/docs/_static/pandas-square.svg",
            "type": "url",
        },
    ],
    ...
}

To display a local image from a file path, use "type": "local", and add a path to an image relative to your documentation root in the icon value. For example:

html_theme_options = {
    ...
    "icon_links": [
        {
            "name": "PyData",
            "url": "https://pydata.org",
            "icon": "_static/pydata-logo-square.png",
            "type": "local",
        },
    ],
    ...
}

Tip

Use .svg images for a higher-resolution output that behaves similarly across screen sizes.

Icon Link Shortcuts

There are a few shortcuts supported to minimize configuration for commonly-used services. These may be removed in a future release in favor of icon_links:

html_theme_options = {
    ...
    "github_url": "https://github.com/<your-org>/<your-repo>",
    "gitlab_url": "https://gitlab.com/<your-org>/<your-repo>",
    "bitbucket_url": "https://bitbucket.org/<your-org>/<your-repo>",
    "twitter_url": "https://twitter.com/<your-handle>",
    ...
}

Add custom attributes to icon links

You can add custom attributes to the link element (<a>) of your icon links. This is helpful if you need to add custom link behavior. To do so, use the pattern "attributes": {"attribute1": "value1"} in a given icon link entry.

For example, to specify a custom target and rel attribute, and to define your custom link classes:

html_theme_options = {
    ...
    "icon_links": [
        {
            "name": "PyData",
            "url": "https://pydata.org",
            "icon": "_static/pydata-logo-square.png",
            "type": "local",
            # Add additional attributes to the href link.
            # The defaults of the target, rel, class, title, and href may be overwritten.
            "attributes": {
               "target" : "_blank",
               "rel" : "noopener me",
               "class": "nav-link custom-fancy-css"
            }
        },
    ],
    ...
}

Warning

This might make your icon links behave unexpectedly and might override the default behavior, so make sure you know what you’re doing!