Customizing the site

The site the html generator builds starts out neutral: your project's name in place of a logo, a grey accent color, and a sidebar listing every page. This guide makes it yours, from colors and a logo to components of your own and whole new page layouts, starting from the site you built in Getting started.

Most of this goes in the html section of your configuration file:

export default {
  target: ['html'],
  global: {
    input: ['docs/**/*.md'],
    output: 'out',
  },
  html: {
    // ... everything on this page
  },
};

Relative paths in the html section resolve against the directory you run doc-kit from, so the examples build absolute ones from the configuration file's location with import.meta.dirname. The Website reference lists every option.

project names the site: the default logo shows it, and so does the version selector. Set it under global, since other generators use it too, or under html for the site alone. Without one, doc-kit uses the name in your package.json.

title is the template for the second half of each page's <title>. The first half is the page's own title, from its title frontmatter or its first heading:

export default {
  html: {
    // "Getting started | Kittens docs"
    title: '{project} docs',
  },
};

The Website reference lists its default and placeholders.

Restyle the site with a stylesheet of your own. stylesheets lists CSS files that are bundled after doc-kit's own, so their rules and custom properties win, and that go through the bundler like any other CSS (@import and url() work).

The UI takes its accent color, used for links, focus rings and active states, from nine --color-brand-* custom properties. Redefine them all to rebrand the site:

:root {
  --color-brand-100: #f3f0ff;
  --color-brand-200: #e4dcff;
  --color-brand-300: #cbbcff;
  --color-brand-400: #ac94fa;
  --color-brand-500: #8e6cf0;
  --color-brand-600: #7350d9;
  --color-brand-700: #5c3db8;
  --color-brand-800: #482f91;
  --color-brand-900: #33216a;
}

import { join } from 'node:path';

export default {
  html: {
    stylesheets: [join(import.meta.dirname, 'theme/styles.css')],
  },
};

One palette serves both color schemes: the UI picks lighter shades in dark mode. For styles of your own that differ in dark mode, use the [data-theme='dark'] selector, which matches once the <html> element is in dark mode.

The text uses the font in --font-open-sans, and code the one in --font-ibm-plex-mono. They are named after doc-kit's default fonts, but hold whatever font stack you give them:

@font-face {
  font-family: 'Inter Variable';
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: 100 900;
  font-display: swap;
  src: url('./fonts/inter-latin-wght-normal.woff2') format('woff2');
}

:root {
  --font-open-sans: 'Inter Variable', system-ui, sans-serif;
}

Prefer a stylesheet to a <style> tag in the <head>: it is bundled, minified and cached with the rest of the site's CSS.

The logo sits at the start of the navigation bar, inside a link to the home page. By default it is the project's name as text. To replace it, point the #theme/Logo alias at a component of your own:

import { join } from 'node:path';

export default {
  html: {
    imports: {
      '#theme/Logo': join(import.meta.dirname, 'theme/Logo.jsx'),
    },
  },
};

import { project } from '#theme/config';

export default () => (
  <span class="logo">
    <svg width="24" height="24" viewBox="0 0 24 24" aria-hidden="true">
      <circle cx="12" cy="12" r="12" fill="var(--color-brand-600)" />
    </svg>
    {project}
  </span>
);

The logo is one of the parts of the page you can replace, and #theme/config holds the build-time data components can read.

head adds tags to every page's <head>; see Head tags. Files you link to have to be in the output: pathsToCopy copies them there.

Every page is written from an HTML template. It places the head tags and also writes the <title>, the og:title and og:type tags, and the tags loading the site's scripts and styles. For anything else, copy the default template (src/html/template.html in @doc-kit/generator-react) and point templatePath at your copy. Keep ${assets} in its <head>, or the pages load no scripts or styles. The Website reference lists the template's variables.

Without configuration, the sidebar has one group, API Documentation, listing every page by its title, and the navigation bar has no links. navigation replaces either; see Navigation for an example and every field.

The navigation bar also holds the search box, the theme switch, and a link to the GitHub repository when global.repository is set. The sidebar adds a version selector when your configuration has a changelog, as Publishing several versions describes.

Every part of the page around your content is a component, imported through a #theme/* alias:

Point an alias at your own component in imports, and every page uses it. The theme slots table lists each alias, its default and the props it receives.

Components read build-time data from the #theme/config module, and virtualImports adds modules of your own; see Theme config module.

Markdown pages have no components: their tags are plain HTML. To use components in a page, write it in MDX, register your components in components (see Components in MDX), and use them as tags:

export default ({ title, children }) => (
  <section class="hero">
    <p class="hero__title">{title}</p>
    {children}
  </section>
);

---
title: Kittens
---

# Kittens

<Hero title="An API for cats">
  Feed, pet and schedule naps, from one small library.
</Hero>

Some components come built in and need no registering, such as <DocumentationIndex />.

Components render to HTML when the site is built, and load no JavaScript. A component that has to run in the browser, with state, effects or event handlers, has to be an island: wrap it with withIsland, and list it in components under the name you give it, even when only other components render it. Interactive components in the Website reference shows how.

An island missing from components stays static, and the browser console reports [is-land] no component registered for "Counter".

With interaction: true, the click that hydrates an island reaches it before its component has loaded, so the component never handles that click. An island that has to handle its first click hydrates on interaction: 'pointerover,focusin,touchstart' instead, as doc-kit's code blocks do: it starts loading as the pointer or focus arrives, and a click that lands before it has loaded is replayed once it has.

The island's first render in the browser has to match the HTML built for it, so read browser-only state, such as localStorage, in an effect.

#theme/Layout renders every page, so a layout of your own can give some pages a different shape. This site's home page, for example, sets layout: home in its frontmatter, and the site's layout renders it full width, between the navigation bar and the footer, while every other page gets doc-kit's documentation layout:

import DocLayout from '@doc-kit/generator-react/html/ui/components/Layout/index.jsx';

import Footer from '#theme/Footer';
import NavBar from '#theme/Navigation';

const HomeLayout = ({ metadata, children }) => (
  <>
    <NavBar metadata={metadata} />
    <div class="home" role="main">
      {children}
    </div>
    <Footer />
  </>
);

const LAYOUTS = { home: HomeLayout };

export default props => {
  const Layout = LAYOUTS[props.metadata.layout] ?? DocLayout;

  return <Layout {...props} />;
};

---
title: Kittens
layout: home
---

<Hero title="An API for cats" />

Point #theme/Layout at it in imports. A layout receives the page's metadata, every field of its frontmatter included, its headings, its readingTime and its content as children; the Website reference describes each.

doc-kit also builds a 404.html page, whose metadata.api is '404': check for it to give that page a layout of its own.

The pages' Markdown is rendered by the jsx-ast generator, which takes your own unified plugins: remark plugins for the Markdown, rehype plugins for the HTML, and recma plugins for the JavaScript it compiles to. This site uses a rehype plugin to inline its diagrams as SVG, so they follow the color scheme. See Markdown plugins.

Vite builds the site by default. To pass it plugins or options, or to build with another bundler, see Bundler adapters.

This site is built with doc-kit, from the www/ directory of its repository, and its configuration file uses most of this page:

• A layout with a home layout for the home page, a 404 page, and doc-kit's layout for everything else.
• A logo and a footer of its own.
• Islands for the home page's two animations, and the sections the page is laid out with, all listed in components.
• A stylesheet that swaps the typeface for Inter and keeps doc-kit's neutral palette, and a template that preloads Inter instead of Open Sans.
• A #theme/site virtual module with doc-kit's version, for the footer.
• A rehype plugin that inlines the diagrams, and pathsToCopy for its public files, fonts and JSON schemas.

When your site looks right, Publishing your docs covers putting it online.