ToC or Sidebar in GitHub Wiki

Question

How do I create a ToC or a sidebar menu in a GitHub Wiki?

I saw some mentions of it and gollum the backend seems to support it, but how do I do it in a current GitHub project?

It should best be based on the headers I have in the page automatically.

These links all mention it, but do not show how to do it:

• https://gist.github.com/379469 - some JavaScript hack

• https://github.com/blog/774-git-powered-wikis-improved - GitHub mentioning it:

  "GitHub Wikis have a little-documented ability for footers and sidebars, something which some of our git-based Wiki authors are familiar with. The new Wiki editor gives you limited web-based editing of the footers and sidebars you have on your site. "

Answer 1

While your solution works, there's an easier way to do it using GitHub's web interface. You can simply create a page named _Sidebar and/or _Footer .

See detailed instructions in Github Wiki sidebar menu builder with multi-level .

Edit The original article is gone and I can't find it in the cache so I've updated the link.

Answer 2

When you are in the wiki of your project, there is a link Add a custom sidebar . Click that.

Now you have a page that you edit as you would edit any other Markdown page. To make a table of contents you have to do it manually though. There is no automated method (as of August 2014). So for example:

# My menu
* [Home][home]
* [Technical documentation][techdocs]
* [User manual][usermanual]

[home]: https://github.com/myproject/wiki/Home
[techdocs]: https://github.com/myproject/wiki/Technical-documentation
[usermanual]: https://github.com/myproject/wiki/User-manual

Answer 3

Okay. Let me see if I understand this correctly:

1. Clone your GitHub wiki. (There's a Git section in the wiki. You can checkout your wiki-like code.)
2. Create _Sidebar.md
3. In normal wiki pages, use [[link]] for the sidebar
4. Commit and push back to GitHub

This process is a pain in the ass. I'm surprised this “gollum” wiki has any acceptance.

Also: _Sidebar.md is therefore global for all pages . I would have to organize my wiki into folders, so I can define different sidebars for different pages.

Answer 4

Note that the original question was about creating a side bar (easy, solved in the answers) or an actual table of contents (not answered).

One thing I can say is that the gollum 2.1 wiki syntax allows for a [[_TOC_]] tag, but a GitHub wiki won't recognise that (yet?).

Answer 5

I think this is described in the Gollum README . (See the header and sidebar sections.)

Essentially, you make a _footer.ext and _sidebar.ext in the directory containing the page content.

Answer 6

I just created a Python script which generates an index in the _Sidebar.md of GitHub based on the folder structure and pages in the wiki git.

Answer 7

I have implemented the npm module github-wiki-sidebar to help github users to easily create and maintain the sidebar menu.

Source and Result: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wiki/adriantanasa/github-wiki-sidebar/images/github-wiki-sidebar-generator.png

Source pages (as displayed in Wiki admin):

Home
Installation
Roadmap
Usage
Usage: Command line modifiers
Usage: Init Mode

Result (with customised order):

• Home
• Installation
• Usage
  • Init mode
  • Command line modifiers
• Roadmap

Pre-requirements:

• clone your github wiki repository locally (displayed on the bottom-right of the Wiki UI)

• install the github-wiki-sidebar

   git clone <https://github.com/<username>/<my-project-name>.wiki.git npm install -g github-wiki-sidebar

Create/update your wiki menu:

• create new pages / rename pages on your github.com wiki admin

• execute locally the github-wiki-sidebar script in your wiki repository folder

  cd /path/to/<my-project-name>.wiki # this fetches latest changes, generates sidebar file (_Sidebar.md) and pushes changes to github github-wiki-sidebar --git-push

The module allows customisation of the markdown output including ordering of items, the category separator, the template for the menu, the format of links and others.

Answer 8

GitHub will auto-generate a document table of contents:

1. Make the doc type AsciiDoc instead of Markdown.
2. Insert :toc: at the start of the document.