Homepage / index page for a sidebar category?

[borekb]

I have a sidebar like this:

module.exports = {
  docs: {
    'Reference': ['doc1', 'doc2', 'doc3'],
  },
};

Which produces this:

• Reference
  • Doc 1 (/reference/doc1)
  • Doc 2 (/reference/doc2)
  • Doc 3 (/reference/doc3)

I'd like to make the route /reference work as well and probably write some simple content for it, like "Please select one of the topics from the sidebar" or perhaps auto-generate the content from my actual reference docs.

(I don't want to create a route like /reference/reference-introduction – that is still nested while I'd prefer to make the "parent" route working. The use case is that the user / visitor deletes the /doc1 part of the URL and I'd like them to land on a working page.)

How would I go about that?

[borekb]

(My own brainstorming thread, not really an answer.)

I'm not even sure how I imagine Docusaurus would support this, I just feel that removing parts of URL should not lead to 404s. For example, I think that all these should render something or redirect somewhere:

• /docs/reference/doc1
• /docs/reference
• /docs

Only the first one works, currently. Maybe the other two could redirect to the "closest reasonable page", like:

• /docs redirects to → /docs/intro/welcome
• /docs/reference redirects to → /docs/reference/doc1

Another option would be to support some special file like <project>/docs/reference/_index.md which would render on the /docs/reference route but would not be visible in a sidebar.

I don't know...

[borekb]

I've tried in two projects that I generally admire when it comes to their documentation, and they both produce 404s on manually entered parent URLs:

• Next.js:
  • 200 https://nextjs.org/docs/api-reference/cli
  • 404 https://nextjs.org/docs/api-reference
• Apollo:
  • 200 https://www.apollographql.com/docs/devtools/cli/
  • 404 https://www.apollographql.com/docs/devtools/

🤷‍♂️

[slorber]

Hi,

You can control the url of each doc with the slug frontmatter, so it is already possible to create:

• doc1.md: slug: /references
• doc2.md: slug: /references/doc2

Not sure it's related, but we also plan to support sidebar categories linking to a doc:
#2643

We don't do the redirect you ask for by default (it would be hard for us to know where to redirect to), but you can probably add it in userland.
There's the redirect plugin to redirect one URL to any other URL you want, and you can create content at any URL thanks to slug.