Site Configuration

On this page, you’ll learn:

  • How to add a title to the site.

  • How to configure the site’s base URL.

  • How to assign a site start page.

  • How to associate the site with a Google Analytics account.

Add a site title

Use the title key (title) to add a title to your site.

site:
  title: Demo Docs Site

The title is displayed wherever the site’s UI calls this key. Antora’s default UI displays the site title in the navigation bar at the top of the site.

Configure the base URL

The site URL key (url) defines the optional base URL of the published site.

If set, the URL must either be an absolute URL (e.g., https://docs.example.com) or a pathname (aka root-relative path) (e.g., /docs). The value should not contain a trailing slash. If the the URL is absolute, it may include a pathname segment (e.g., https://example.com/docs).

If the url value is an absolute URL, it must start with a valid URL scheme directly followed by a colon and two slashes (://). Common URI schemes include https://, http://, and file://. 
site:
  url: https://demo.antora.org

The site URL is only used in the generated site when either an absolute URL is required or a pathname. It also implicitly activates any features that require an absolute URL or a pathname.

Features that require an absolute URL are the sitemap files and the canonical URL property in the UI model (which gets included in the head of each page). In those instances, the component, version, module, and page segments are appended to the site URL to produce the complete URL. For example, https://docs.example.org/component/version/page.html. Features that require a pathname (which can be derived from the absolute URL) are the 404 page and the URL prefix on redirect rules.

Configure the site start page

You can use a page from a documentation component as the index page for your site. When a start page is specified, visitors are redirected from the site’s index page at the base URL to the URL of the start page.

The start page key (start_page) accepts a page ID as a value.

Use a specific version

If you want the site’s start page to be a specific version of the designated page, include the version in the page ID.

site:
  title: Demo Docs Site
  url: https://demo.antora.org
  start_page: 1.0@component-b::index.adoc

In this example, https://demo.antora.org/index.html will redirect to https://demo.antora.org/component-b/1.0/index.html.

Use the latest version

If you want the start page to always point to the last version of the page you designate, don’t include a version in the page ID.

site:
  title: Demo Docs Site
  url: https://demo.antora.org
  start_page: component-b::index.adoc

For this example, let’s say that version 2.0 is the latest version of Component B. In this case, https://demo.antora.org/index.html will redirect to https://demo.antora.org/component-b/2.0/index.html.

Add a Google analytics account

Account keys for services can be passed to Antora using the keys subcategory. The google_analytics key assigns a Google Analytics account to the site.

site:
  title: Demo Docs Site
  url: https://demo.antora.org
  keys:
    google_analytics: 'XX-123456'

The account key must be enclosed in single quotation marks (').

Generate a robots.txt file

Antora can generate a robots.txt file (aka robots exclusion standard) for the site to control which paths in the sitemap crawlers can visit.

If the site.robots key in the playbook is both set and non-empty, and the site.url is also defined, Antora will generate a robots.txt file at the root of the site.

The allowed values of this key are as follows:

  • allow

  • disallow

  • arbitrary, multiline string

The special values allow and disallow are shorthand for allowing or disallowing all user agents access to all paths.

Let’s assume the site category in playbook is defined as follows:

site:
  url: https://example.org
  robots: allow

This will generate a robots.txt file that allows access to all paths.

robots.txt produced when value is allow
User-agent: *
Allow: /

Similarly, if the site category in playbook is defined as follows:

site:
  url: https://example.org
  robots: disallow

This will generate a robots.txt file that disallows access to all paths.

robots.txt file produced when value is disallow
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Any other non-empty value will be used as the contents of the robots.txt file. For example, let’s assume the site.robots key is declared as follows:

site:
  url: https://example.org
  robots: |
    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /private/

This will result in the following robots.txt file being generated.

robots.txt file produced with custom values
User-agent: *
Disallow: /private/

Use a custom value if the built-in options are insufficient.