After installing Docusaurus, you now have a skeleton to work from for your specific website. The following discusses the rest of the Docusaurus structure in order for you to prepare your site.

Directory Structure

As shown after you installed Docusaurus, the initialization script created a directory structure similar to:

  1. root-directory
  2. ├── .gitignore
  3. ├── docs
  4. │   ├── doc1.md
  5. │   ├── doc2.md
  6. │   ├── doc3.md
  7. │   ├── exampledoc4.md
  8. │   └── exampledoc5.md
  9. └── website
  10.     ├── blog
  11.     │   ├── 2016-03-11-blog-post.md
  12.     │   ├── 2017-04-10-blog-post-two.md
  13.     │   ├── 2017-09-25-testing-rss.md
  14.     │   ├── 2017-09-26-adding-rss.md
  15.     │   └── 2017-10-24-new-version-1.0.0.md
  16.     ├── core
  17.     │   └── Footer.js
  18.     ├── package.json
  19.     ├── pages
  20.     ├── sidebars.json
  21.     ├── siteConfig.js
  22.     └── static

Directory Descriptions

  • Documentation Source Files: The docs directory contains example documentation files written in Markdown.
  • Blog: The website/blog directory contains examples of blog posts written in markdown.
  • Pages: The website/pages directory contains example top-level pages for the site.
  • Static files and images: The website/static directory contains static assets used by the example site.

Key Files

  • Footer: The website/core/Footer.js file is a React component that acts as the footer for the site generated by Docusaurus and should be customized by the user.
  • Configuration file: The website/siteConfig.js file is the main configuration file used by Docusaurus.
  • Sidebars: The sidebars.json file contains the structure and order of the documentation files.
  • .gitignore: The .gitignore file lists the necessary ignore files for the generated site so that they do not get added to the git repo.

Preparation Notes

You will need to keep the website/siteConfig.js and website/core/Footer.js files but may edit them as you wish. The value of the customDocsPath key in website/siteConfig.js can be modified if you wish to use a different directory name or path. The website directory can also be renamed to anything you want it to be.

However, you should keep the website/pages and website/static directories. You may change the content inside them as you wish. At the bare minimum, you should have an en/index.js or en/index.html file inside website/pages and an image to use as your header icon inside website/static.

If your directory does not yet have a .gitignore, we generate it with the necessary ignored files listed. As a general rule, you should ignore all node_modules, build files, system files (.DS_Store), logs, etc. Here is a more comprehensive list of what is normally ignored for Node.js projects.