# Getting started ## Installation ### Installing MkDocs Before installing [MkDocs][1], you need to make sure you have Python and `pip` – the Python package manager – up and running. You can verify if you're already good to go with the following commands: ``` sh python --version # Python 2.7.13 pip --version # pip 9.0.1 ``` Installing and verifying MkDocs is as simple as: ``` sh pip install mkdocs && mkdocs --version # mkdocs, version 0.17.1 ``` Material requires MkDocs >= 0.17.1. [1]: https://www.mkdocs.org ### Installing Material #### using pip Material can be installed with `pip`: ``` sh pip install mkdocs-material ``` #### using choco If you're on Windows you can use [Chocolatey][2] to install [Material][3]: ``` dos choco install mkdocs-material ``` This will install all required dependencies like [Python][4] and [MkDocs][5]. [2]: https://chocolatey.org [3]: https://chocolatey.org/packages/mkdocs-material [4]: https://chocolatey.org/packages/python [5]: https://chocolatey.org/packages/mkdocs #### cloning from GitHub Material can also be used without a system-wide installation by cloning the repository into a subfolder of your project's root directory: ``` sh git clone https://github.com/squidfunk/mkdocs-material.git ``` This is especially useful if you want to [extend the theme][6] and [override some parts][7] of the theme. The theme will reside in the folder `mkdocs-material/material`. [6]: customization.md#extending-the-theme [7]: customization.md#overriding-partials ### Troubleshooting !!! warning "Installation on macOS" When you're running the pre-installed version of Python on macOS, `pip` tries to install packages in a folder for which your user might not have the adequate permissions. There are two possible solutions for this: 1. **Installing in user space** (recommended): Provide the `--user` flag to the install command and `pip` will install the package in a user-site location. This is the recommended way. 2. **Switching to a homebrewed Python**: Upgrade your Python installation to a self-contained solution by installing Python with Homebrew. This should eliminate a lot of problems you may be having with `pip`. !!! failure "Error: unrecognized theme 'material'" If you run into this error, the most common reason is that you installed MkDocs through some package manager (e.g. Homebrew or `apt-get`) and the Material theme through `pip`, so both packages end up in different locations. MkDocs only checks its install location for themes. ### Alternative: Using Docker If you're familiar with Docker, the official [Docker image][8] for Material comes with all dependencies pre-installed and ready-to-use with the latest version published on PyPI, packaged in a very small image. Pull it with: ``` docker pull squidfunk/mkdocs-material ``` The `mkdocs` executable is provided as an entrypoint, `serve` is the default command. Start the development server in your project root with: ``` docker run --rm -it -p 8000:8000 -v ${PWD}:/docs squidfunk/mkdocs-material ``` If you're using Windows command prompt (`cmd.exe`), substitute `${PWD}` with `"%cd%"`. [8]: https://hub.docker.com/r/squidfunk/mkdocs-material/ ## Usage In order to enable the theme just add one of the following lines to your project's `mkdocs.yml`. If you installed Material using a package manager: ``` yaml theme: name: 'material' ``` If you cloned Material from GitHub: ``` yaml theme: name: null custom_dir: 'mkdocs-material/material' ``` MkDocs includes a development server, so you can review your changes as you go. The development server can be started with the following command: ``` sh mkdocs serve ``` Now you can point your browser to [http://localhost:8000][9] and the Material theme should be visible. From here on, you can start writing your documentation, or read on and customize the theme. [9]: http://localhost:8000 ## Configuration ### Color palette A default hue is defined for every primary and accent color on Google's Material Design [color palette][10], which makes it very easy to change the overall look of the theme. Just set the primary and accent colors using the following variables: ``` yaml theme: palette: primary: 'indigo' accent: 'indigo' ``` Color names are case-insensitive, but must match the names of the Material Design color palette. Valid values are: `red`, `pink`, `purple`, `deep purple`, `indigo`, `blue`, `light blue`, `cyan`, `teal`, `green`, `light green`, `lime`, `yellow`, `amber`, `orange`, `deep orange`, `brown`, `grey`, `blue grey` and `white`. The last four colors can only be used as a primary color. If the color is set via this configuration, an additional CSS file that defines the color palette is automatically included. If you want to keep things lean, clone the repository and recompile the theme with your custom colors set. See the guide on [customization][11] for more information. [10]: http://www.materialui.co/colors [11]: customization.md #### Primary colors > Default: `indigo` Click on a tile to change the primary color of the theme: #### Accent colors > Default: `indigo` Click on a tile to change the accent color of the theme: ### Font family > Default: `Roboto` and `Roboto Mono` By default the [Roboto font family][12] is included with the theme, specifically the regular sans-serif type for text and the `monospaced` type for code. Both fonts are loaded from [Google Fonts][13] and can be changed to other fonts, like for example the [Ubuntu font family][14]: ``` yaml theme: font: text: 'Ubuntu' code: 'Ubuntu Mono' ``` The text font will be loaded in weights 400 and **700**, the `monospaced` font in regular weight. If you want to load fonts from other destinations or don't want to use the Google Fonts loading magic, just set `font` to `false`: ``` yaml theme: font: false ``` [12]: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Roboto [13]: https://fonts.google.com [14]: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Ubuntu ### Logo > Default icon: `school` Your logo should have rectangular shape with a minimum resolution of 128x128, leave some room towards the edges and be composed of high contrast areas on a transparent ground, as it will be placed on the colored header bar and drawer. Simply create the folder `docs/images`, add your logo and embed it with: ``` yaml theme: logo: 'images/logo.svg' ``` Additionally, the default icon can be changed by setting an arbitrary ligature (or Unicode code point) from the [Material Design icon font][15], e.g. ``` yaml theme: logo: icon: 'cloud' ``` [15]: https://material.io/icons/ ### Language !!! info "Call for Contributions: Add languages/translations to Material" Help translate Material into more languages - it's just **one click** and takes approximately **2 minutes**: [click here](http://bit.ly/2EbzFc8) #### Localization > Default: `en` Material for MkDocs supports internationalization (i18n) and provides translations for all template variables and labels in the following languages:
Available languages
ar / Arabic ca / Catalan cs / Czech da / Danish
nl / Dutch en / English fi / Finnish fr / French
gl / Galician de / German gr / Greek he / Hebrew
hi / Hindi hr / Croatian hu / Hungarian id / Indonesian
it / Italian ja / Japanese kr / Korean no / Norwegian
nn / Norwegian (Nynorsk) fa / Persian pl / Polish
pt / Portugese ru / Russian sr / Serbian sh / Serbo-Croatian
sk / Slovak si / Slovenian es / Spanish sv / Swedish
tr / Turkish uk / Ukrainian vi / Vietnamese zh / Chinese (Simplified)
zh-Hant / Chinese (Traditional) zh-TW / Chinese (Taiwanese)
Submit a new language
Specify the language with: ``` yaml theme: language: 'en' ``` If the language is not specified, Material falls back to English. To create a translation for another language, copy the localization file of an existing language, name the new file using the [2-letter language code][16] and adjust all translations: ``` sh cp partials/language/en.html partials/language/jp.html ``` [16]: https://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_language_codes.asp #### Text direction > Default: best match for given theme language, automatically set Material supports both, left-to-right (`ltr`) and right-to-left (`rtl`) text direction. This enables more languages like Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac and others to be used with the theme: ``` yaml theme: direction: 'rtl' ``` #### Site search > Default: best match for given theme language, automatically set Site search is implemented using [lunr.js][17], which includes stemmers for the English language by default, while stemmers for other languages are included with [lunr-languages][18], both of which are integrated with this theme. Material selects the matching (or best-matching) stemmer for the given theme language. Multilingual search can be activated in your project's `mkdocs.yml` by explicitly defining the search language(s): ``` yaml extra: search: language: 'en, de, ru' ``` At the time of writing, the following languages are supported:
Available language stemmers
da / Danish du / Dutch en / English fi / Finnish
fr / French de / German hu / Hungarian it / Italian
ja / Japanese no / Norwegian pt / Portugese ro / Romanian
ru / Russian es / Spanish sv / Swedish tr / Turkish
!!! warning "MkDocs 1.0 compatibility" While MkDocs 1.0 supports prebuilding the search index, Material currently doesn't support this setting as the default search behavior of the original theme was heavily modified for the sake of a better UX. Integration is possible, but a small subset of the features Material provides will not be portable to the prebuilt index mainly due to missing localization. !!! warning "Only specify the languages you really need" Be aware that including support for other languages increases the general JavaScript payload by around 20kb (without gzip) and by another 15-30kb per language. The separator for tokenization can be customized which makes it possible to index parts of words that are separated by `-` or `.`: ``` yaml extra: search: tokenizer: '[\s\-\.]+' ``` [17]: https://lunrjs.com [18]: https://github.com/MihaiValentin/lunr-languages ### Favicon > Default: `assets/images/favicon.png` The default favicon can be changed by setting the `favicon` variable to an `.ico` or image file: ``` yaml theme: favicon: 'assets/images/favicon.ico' ``` ### Features #### Tabs > Default: `false` By default, the entire navigation is rendered on the left side using collapsible sections (different from the default MkDocs theme which renders the top-level sections in the header), because horizontal navigation is often problematic on smaller screens. However, for large documentation projects it's sometimes desirable to add another navigation layer to separate top-level sections. Material achieves this with the tabs feature, which can be enabled by setting the respective feature flag to `true`: ``` yaml theme: feature: tabs: true ``` When tabs are enabled, *top-level sections* will be rendered in an additional layer directly below the header. The navigation on the left side will only include the pages contained within the selected section. Furthermore, *top-level pages* defined inside your project's `mkdocs.yml` will be grouped under the first tab which will receive the title of the first page. ## Customization ### Adding a source repository To include a link to the repository of your project within your documentation, set the following variables via your project's `mkdocs.yml`: ``` yaml repo_name: 'squidfunk/mkdocs-material' repo_url: 'https://github.com/squidfunk/mkdocs-material' ``` The name of the repository will be rendered next to the search bar on big screens and as part of the main navigation drawer on smaller screen sizes. Furthermore, if `repo_url` points to a GitHub, BitBucket or GitLab repository, the respective service logo will be shown next to the name of the repository. Additionally, for GitHub, the number of stars and forks is shown. If the repository is hosted in a private environment, the service logo can be set explicitly by setting `extra.repo_icon` to `github`, `gitlab` or `bitbucket`. !!! question "Why is there an edit button at the top of every article?" If the `repo_url` is set to a GitHub or BitBucket repository, and the `repo_name` is set to *GitHub* or *BitBucket* (implied by default), an edit button will appear at the top of every article. This is the automatic behavior that MkDocs implements. See the [MkDocs documentation][19] on more guidance regarding the `edit_uri` attribute, which defines whether the edit button is shown or not. [19]: https://www.mkdocs.org/user-guide/configuration/#edit_uri ### Adding social links Social accounts can be linked in the footer of the documentation using the automatically included [FontAwesome][20] webfont. The `type` must denote the name of the social service, e.g. `github`, `twitter` or `linkedin` and the `link` must contain the URL you want to link to: ``` yaml extra: social: - type: 'github' link: 'https://github.com/squidfunk' - type: 'twitter' link: 'https://twitter.com/squidfunk' - type: 'linkedin' link: 'https://linkedin.com/in/squidfunk' ``` The links are generated in order and the `type` of the links must match the name of the FontAwesome glyph. The `fa` is automatically added, so `github` will result in `fa fa-github`. [20]: http://fontawesome.io/icons/ ### Adding a Web App Manifest A [Web App Manifest][21] is a simple JSON file that tells the browser about your web application and how it should behave when installed on the user's mobile device or desktop. You can specify a manifest in your `mkdocs.yml`: ```yaml extra: manifest: 'manifest.webmanifest' ``` [21]: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/web-app-manifest/ ### More advanced customization If you want to change the general appearance of the Material theme, see [this article][22] for more information on advanced customization. [22]: customization.md ## Integrations ### Google Analytics MkDocs makes it easy to integrate site tracking with Google Analytics. Besides basic tracking, clicks on all outgoing links can be tracked as well as how site search is used. Tracking can be activated in your project's `mkdocs.yml`: ``` yaml google_analytics: - 'UA-XXXXXXXX-X' - 'auto' ``` ### Disqus Material for MkDocs is integrated with [Disqus][23], so if you want to add a comments section to your documentation set the shortname of your Disqus project in your `mkdocs.yml`: ``` yaml extra: disqus: 'your-shortname' ``` The comments section is inserted on *every page, except the index page*. Additionally, a new entry at the bottom of the table of contents is generated that is linking to the comments section. The necessary JavaScript is automatically included. !!! warning "Requirements" `site_url` value must be set in `mkdocs.yml` for the Disqus integration to load properly. Disqus can also be enabled or disabled for specific pages using [Metadata][24]. [23]: https://disqus.com [24]: extensions/metadata.md#disqus ## Extensions MkDocs supports several [Markdown extensions][25]. The following extensions are not enabled by default (see the link for which are enabled by default) but highly recommended, so they should be switched on at all times: ``` yaml markdown_extensions: - admonition - codehilite: guess_lang: false - toc: permalink: true ``` For more information, see the following list of extensions supported by the Material theme including more information regarding installation and usage: * [Admonition][26] * [Codehilite][27] * [Footnotes][28] * [Metadata][29] * [Permalinks][30] * [PyMdown Extensions][31] [25]: https://www.mkdocs.org/user-guide/writing-your-docs/#markdown-extensions [26]: extensions/admonition.md [27]: extensions/codehilite.md [28]: extensions/footnotes.md [29]: extensions/metadata.md [30]: extensions/permalinks.md [31]: extensions/pymdown.md ## Plugins MkDocs's plugin architecture makes it possible to add pre- or post-processing steps that sit between the theme and your documentation. A great example of a third-party plugin is the [mkdocs-minify-plugin][32] which strips all whitespace from the generated documentation. Install it with `pip`: ``` sh pip install mkdocs-minify-plugin ``` Enable it with the following lines in your `mkdocs.yml`: ``` yaml plugins: - search - minify: minify_html: true minify_js: true ``` The MkDocs wiki contains a [list of all available plugins][33]. !!! warning "Remember to re-add the `search` plugin" If you have no `plugins` entry in your config file yet, you'll likely also want to add the `search` plugin. MkDocs enables it by default if there is no `plugins` entry set. [32]: https://github.com/byrnereese/mkdocs-minify-plugin [33]: https://github.com/mkdocs/mkdocs/wiki/MkDocs-Plugins ## Full example Below is a full example configuration for a `mkdocs.yml`: ``` yaml # Project information site_name: 'Material for MkDocs' site_description: 'A Material Design theme for MkDocs' site_author: 'Martin Donath' site_url: 'https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/' # Repository repo_name: 'squidfunk/mkdocs-material' repo_url: 'https://github.com/squidfunk/mkdocs-material' # Copyright copyright: 'Copyright © 2016 - 2017 Martin Donath' # Configuration theme: name: 'material' language: 'en' palette: primary: 'indigo' accent: 'indigo' font: text: 'Roboto' code: 'Roboto Mono' # Customization extra: manifest: 'manifest.webmanifest' social: - type: 'github' link: 'https://github.com/squidfunk' - type: 'twitter' link: 'https://twitter.com/squidfunk' - type: 'linkedin' link: 'https://linkedin.com/in/squidfunk' # Google Analytics google_analytics: - 'UA-XXXXXXXX-X' - 'auto' # Extensions markdown_extensions: - admonition - codehilite: guess_lang: false - toc: permalink: true ```