Add/Remove items from theme sections#

There are a few major theme sections that you can customize to add/remove components, or add your own components. Each section is configured with a list of html templates - these are snippets of HTML that are inserted into the section by Sphinx.

You can choose which templates show up in each section, as well as the order in which they appear. This page describes the major areas that you can customize.

Note

When configuring templates in each section, you may omit the .html suffix after each template if you wish.

The navbar items#

The navbar is at the top of the page, and is broken up into three sections. Each section is configured in conf.py with the following configuration:

  • Left section: html_theme_options['navbar_start']

  • Middle menu: html_theme_options['navbar_center']

  • Right section: html_theme_options['navbar_end']

By default, the following configuration is used:

html_theme_options = {
...
"navbar_start": ["navbar-logo"],
"navbar_center": ["navbar-nav"],
"navbar_end": ["navbar-icon-links"]
...
}

The left sidebar#

The left sidebar is just to the left of a page’s main content. Configuring it is a bit different from configuring the other sections, because configuring the sidebar is natively supported in Sphinx, via the html_sidebars configuration variable.

For the left sidebar only, you can configure templates so that they only show up on certain pages. You do so via a configuration like so in conf.py:

html_sidebars = {
    "<page_pattern>": ["list", "of", "templates"]
}

Any pages that match <page_pattern> will have their respective templates inserted. You can also * to do glob-style matching, and may use ** to match all pages.

By default, it has the following configuration:

html_sidebars = {
    "**": ["search-field", "sidebar-nav-bs", "sidebar-ethical-ads"]
}

The right in-page sidebar#

The in-page sidebar is just to the right of a page’s main content, and is configured in conf.py with html_theme_options['page_sidebar_items'].

By default, it has the following templates:

html_theme_options = {
  ...
  "page_sidebar_items": ["page-toc", "edit-this-page"],
  ...
}

A list of built-in templates you can insert into sections#

Below is a list of built-in templates that you can insert into any section. Note that some of them may have CSS rules that assume a specific section (and will be named accordingly).

  • icon-links.html

  • search-field.html

  • copyright.html

  • edit-this-page.html

  • last-updated.html

  • navbar-icon-links.html

  • navbar-logo.html

  • navbar-nav.html

  • page-toc.html

  • sidebar-ethical-ads.html

  • sidebar-nav-bs.html

  • sphinx-version.html

  • version-switcher.html

Add your own HTML templates to theme sections#

If you’d like to add your own custom template to any of these sections, you could do so with the following steps:

  1. Create an HTML file in a folder called _templates. For example, if you wanted to display the version of your documentation using a Jinja template, you could create a file: _templates/version.html and put the following in it:

    <!-- This will display the version of the docs -->
{{ version }}

  2. Now add the file to your menu items for one of the sections above. For example:

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

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