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Adding a git repository

If your documentation is related to source code, Material for MkDocs provides the ability to display information to the project's repository as part of the static site, including statistics like stars and forks. Furthermore, individual documents can be linked to specific source files.

Configuration

In order to display a link to the repository of your project as part of your documentation, set repo_url in mkdocs.yml to the public URL of your repository, e.g.:

repo_url: https://github.com/squidfunk/mkdocs-material

The link to 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. Additionally, for GitHub and GitLab, the number of stars and forks is automatically requested and rendered for public repositories.

Repository name

Source · Default: automatically set to GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket

MkDocs will infer the source provider by examining the URL and try to set the repository name automatically. If you wish to customize the name, set repo_name in mkdocs.yml:

repo_name: squidfunk/mkdocs-material

Repository icon

Source · Default: fontawesome/brands/git-alt

While the default repository icon is a generic git icon, it can be set to any icon bundled with the theme by referencing a valid icon path in mkdocs.yml:

theme:
  icon:
    repo: fontawesome/brands/git-alt

Some popular choices:

  • fontawesome/brands/git
  • fontawesome/brands/git-alt
  • fontawesome/brands/git-square
  • fontawesome/brands/github
  • fontawesome/brands/github-alt
  • fontawesome/brands/github-square
  • fontawesome/brands/gitlab
  • fontawesome/brands/gitkraken
  • fontawesome/brands/bitbucket
  • fontawesome/solid/trash

Edit button

Source · Default: automatically set

If the repository URL points to a GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket repository, an edit button is displayed at the top of each document. This behavior can be changed by setting edit_uri in mkdocs.yml:

edit_uri: edit/master/docs/
edit_uri: ""

Revision date

Source · Plugin

The git-revision-date plugin adds support for displaying the date a document was last updated at the bottom of each page. It can be installed with pip:

pip install mkdocs-git-revision-date-plugin

Then, add the following to mkdocs.yml:

plugins:
  - git-revision-date

The following options are supported:

enabled_if_env

Default: none – This option defines whether the date is actually extracted from git, which makes it possible to disable extraction for cases when the repository is not available:

plugins:
  - git-revision-date:
      enabled_if_env: CI

Material for MkDocs doesn't provide official support for the other options of this plugin, so they may be supported but can also yield weird results. Use them at your own risk.

Revision date, localized

Source · Plugin

Similarly, the git-revision-date-localized plugin adds support for adding a localized last updated date at the bottom of each page. It can be installed with pip:

pip install mkdocs-git-revision-date-localized-plugin

Then, add the following to mkdocs.yml:

plugins:
  - git-revision-date-localized

The following options are supported:

type

Default: date – This option allows to change the format of the date to be displayed. Valid values are date, datetime, iso_date, iso_datetime and timeago:

plugins:
  - git-revision-date-localized:
      type: date
fallback_to_build_date

Default: false – This option specifies whether the time when mkdocs build was executed should be used as a fallback when the git repository is not available:

plugins:
  - git-revision-date-localized:
      fallback_to_build_date: true

Material for MkDocs doesn't provide official support for the other options of this plugin, so they may be supported but can also yield weird results. Use them at your own risk.