Global navigation

Global navigation (global nav) is the left-most pane in the documentation. You can use the global nav to browse the content.

Research shows that people use Google to search for GitLab product documentation. When they land on a result, we want them to find topics nearby that are related to the content they're reading. The global nav provides this information.

At the highest level, our global nav is workflow-based. Navigation needs to help users build a mental model of how to use GitLab. The levels under each of the higher workflow-based topics are the names of features. For example:

Use GitLab (workflow) > Build your application (workflow) > Get started (feature) > CI/CD (feature) > Pipelines (feature)

While some older sections of the nav are alphabetical, the nav should primarily be workflow-based.

Without a navigation entry:

• The navigation closes when the page is opened, and the reader loses their place.
• The page isn't visible in a group with other pages.

Choose the right words for your navigation entry

Before you add an item to the left nav, choose the parts of speech you want to use.

The nav entry should match the page title. However, if the title is too long, when you shorten the phrase, use either:

• A noun, like Merge requests.
• An active verb, like Install GitLab or Get started with runners.

Use a phrase that clearly indicates what the page is for. For example, Get started is not as helpful as Get started with runners.

Add a navigation entry

The global nav is stored in the gitlab-org/technical-writing/docs-gitlab-com project, in the data/en-us/navigation.yaml file. The documentation website at docs.gitlab.com is built using Hugo and assembles documentation content from several projects (including charts, gitlab, gitlab-runner, and omnibus-gitlab).

Do not add items to the global nav without the consent of one of the technical writers.

To add a topic to the global navigation:

1. Check that the topic is published on https://docs.gitlab.com.
2. In the navigation.yaml file, add the item.
3. Assign the MR to a technical writer for review and merge.

Where to add

Documentation pages can be said to belong in the following groups:

• GitLab users. This documentation is for day-to-day use of GitLab for users with any level of permissions, from Reporter to Owner.
• GitLab administrators. This tends to be documentation for GitLab Self-Managed instances that requires access to the underlying infrastructure hosting GitLab.
• Other documentation. This includes documentation for customers outside their day-to-day use of GitLab and for contributors. Documentation that doesn't fit in the other groups belongs here.

With these groups in mind, the following are general rules for where new items should be added.

• User documentation belongs in Use GitLab.
• Administration documentation belongs under Administer. This documentation often includes sections that mention:
  • Changing the gitlab.rb or gitlab.yml files.
  • Accessing the rails console or running Rake tasks.
  • Doing things in the Admin area.
  • Tasks that can only be done by an instance administrator.
• Other documentation belongs at the top-level, but care must be taken to not create an enormously long top-level navigation, which defeats the purpose of it.

Making all documentation and navigation items adhere to these principles is being progressively rolled out.

What to add

Having decided where to add a navigation element, the next step is deciding what to add. The mechanics of what is required is documented below but, in principle:

• Navigation item text (that which the reader sees) should:
  • Be as short as possible.
  • Be contextual. It's rare to need to repeat text from a parent item.
  • Avoid jargon or terms of art, unless ubiquitous. For example, CI is an acceptable substitution for Continuous Integration.
• Navigation links must follow the rules documented in the data file.

Pages you don't need to add

Exclude these pages from the global nav:

• Legal notices.
• Pages in the user/application_security/dast/checks/ directory.

The following pages should probably be in the global nav, but the technical writers do not actively work to add them:

• Pages in the /development directory.
• Pages authored by the support team, which are under the doc/administration/troubleshooting directory.

Sometimes a feature page must be excluded from the global navigation. For example, pages for deprecated features might not be in the global nav, depending on how long ago the feature was deprecated. To make it clear these pages are excluded from the global navigation on purpose, add the following code to the page's front matter:

ignore_in_report: true

All other pages should be in the global nav.

Check for missing pages

The technical writing team runs a report to determine which pages are not in the nav. The team reviews this list each month.

This report skips pages with ignore_in_report: true in the front matter.

By default, the report also skips pages in the /development directory, but can be run with an INCLUDE_DEV flag to include these pages if needed:

make check-pages-not-in-nav INCLUDE_DEV=true

Use GitLab section

In addition to feature documentation, each category in the Use GitLab section should contain:

• A top-level page.
• A Get started page.

This ensures a repeatable pattern that familiarizes users with how to navigate the documentation.

The structure for the Use GitLab section is:

• Use GitLab
  • Top-level page
    • Get started page
    • Feature
    • Feature

Composition

The global nav is built from two files:

• Data
• Layout

The data file feeds the layout with the links to the documentation. The layout organizes the data among the nav in containers properly styled.

Data file

The data file describes the structure of the navigation for the applicable project. It is stored at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/technical-writing/docs-gitlab-com/-/blob/main/data/en-us/navigation.yaml.

Each entry comprises of three main components:

• title
• url
• submenu (optional)

For example:

- title: Getting started
  url: 'user/get_started/'
- title: Tutorials
  url: 'tutorials/'
  submenu:
    - title: Find your way around GitLab
      url: 'tutorials/gitlab_navigation/'
      submenu:
        - title: 'Tutorial: Navigate the GitLab interface'
          url: 'tutorials/left_sidebar/'

Each entry can stand alone or contain nested pages, under submenu. New components are indented two spaces.

All nav links:

• Are selectable.
• Must refer to unique pages.
• Must not point to an anchor in a page, for example: path/to/page/#anchor-link.

This must be followed so that we don't have duplicated links nor two .active links at the same time.

Syntax

For all components, respect the indentation and the following syntax rules.

Titles

• Use sentence case, capitalizing feature names.
• There's no need to wrap the titles, unless there's a special character in it. For example, in GitLab CI/CD, there's a / present, therefore, it must be wrapped in quotes. As convention, wrap the titles in double quotes: title: "GitLab CI/CD".

URLs

URLs must be relative. In addition:

• End each URL with a trailing / (not .html or .md).
• Do not start any relative link with a forward slash /.
• Match the path you see on the website.
• As convention, always wrap URLs in single quotes 'url'. To find the global nav link, from the full URL remove https://docs.gitlab.com/.
• Do not link to external URLs. Leaving the documentation site by clicking the left navigation is a confusing user experience.

Examples of relative URLs:

Layout file (logic)

The navigation Vue.js component sidebar_menu.vue is fed by the data file and builds the global nav.

The global nav contains links from all six upstream projects. The global nav URL has a different prefix depending on the documentation file you change.

CSS classes

The nav is styled in the general main.css file. To change its styles, keep them grouped for better development among the team.

Testing

We run various checks on navigation.yaml in check-navigation.sh, which runs as a pipeline job when the YAML file is updated.