Table of Contents

The Table of Contents defines the structure of your MyST project. It is defined in the toc attribute of the project frontmatter.

To automatically add a toc section to your myst.yml file using filenames to define ordering, use the following command:

myst init --write-toc

Structure the Table of Contents¶

The MyST TOC comprises a simple tree structure, built from files, urls, patterns, and children. For example, a simple TOC consisting of files:

version: 1
project:
  toc:
    - file: root.md
    - file: first-child.md
    - file: second-child.md

URL entries¶

URLs can be defined in the TOC. These URLs are links to external references within your table of contents. URLs are ignored in non-web exports.

version: 1
project:
  toc:
    - file: root.md
    - url: 'https://google.com'

Glob pattern matching¶

You can specify glob-like patterns in the TOC with the pattern key. The files matched by pattern will be expanded using similar logic to the implicit table of contents:

• Folder structure is maintained
• Project exclude files are respected
• Index/readme files are sorted to come first
• Files that are listed explicitly in the TOC will be ignored by the pattern

For example, with a folder with root.md, child9.md, child10.md, the following two toc entries are equivalent:

version: 1
project:
  toc:
    - file: root.md
    - pattern: '*.md'

1
2
3
4
5
6
version: 1
project:
  toc:
    - file: root.md
    - file: child9.md
    - file: child10.md

Nesting pages and dropdowns¶

For larger projects, you can group the content using the children key, which can be defined for both url and file entries:

version: 1
project:
  toc:
    - file: root.md
    - file: part-1.md
      children:
        - file: part-1-first-child.md
        - file: part-1-second-child.md
    - file: part-2.md
      children:
        - file: part-2-first-child.md
        - file: part-2-second-child.md

You can nest children under a title without specifying a parent file. This will create a dropdown of pages in the Table of Contents.

version: 1
project:
  toc:
    - file: root.md
    - title: Part 1
      children:
        - file: part-1-first-child.md
        - file: part-1-second-child.md
    - title: Part 2
      children:
        - file: part-2-first-child.md
        - file: part-2-second-child.md

Implicit Table of Contents from filenames¶

When there is no toc field defined in your root myst.yml, the TOC is defined by the file system structure. All markdown and notebook files will be found in the working directory and all sub-directories. Filenames are not treated as case sensitive, and files are listed before folders. All hidden directories are ignored (e.g. .git) and the _build directory is also ignored.

The ordering of the table of contents will sort alphabetically as well as order by number, ensuring that, for example, chapter10 comes after chapter9.

Filename Transformations¶

The filenames will also be transformed into url-friendly “slugs” that: remove preceding numbers (unless they are year-like, e.g. 1988-02 or 2022); rename any non-url characters (spaces, underscores, etc.) to -; lowercase the filename; remove any file extensions (e.g. .md or .ipynb); and keep the slug less than 50 characters. If there are duplicates, these will be enumerated with a trailing number (e.g. readme-1).

• 01-notebook.ipynb will become notebook
• 2021_02_presentation.md will remain 2021-02-presentation

Title Transformations¶

If a title is not provided by a notebook or markdown document in the front matter or first heading, the filename is used. The filename is transformed to a title by splitting on camel case, replacing - or _ with spaces, and transforming to title-case.

• 01_MyNotebook.ipynb becomes My Notebook
• my_article.md becomes My Article

Root Page¶

The “root” of a site is the page displayed when someone browses to the index of your site without any pathname. The CLI will choose the root file in the following order:

1. index.md / README.md / main.md
2. index.tex / README.tex / main.tex
3. index.ipynb / README.ipynb / main.ipynb
4. The first .md file found alphabetically
5. The first .tex file found alphabetically
6. The first .ipynb file found alphabetically

Excluding Files¶

If there are markdown or notebook files within a project folder that you do not want included in your project, you may list these in the myst.yml project frontmatter under exclude. For example, to ignore a single file notes.md, all notebooks in the folder hpc/, and all files named ignore.md:

project:
  exclude:
    - notes.md
    - hpc/*.ipynb
    - '**/ignore.md'

Additionally, files excluded in this way will also not be watched during myst start. This may be useful if you have a folder with many thousands of files that causes the myst start watch task to crash. For example, in the data/ directory, there may be no markdown and no notebooks but 100,000 small data files:

project:
  exclude: data/**

Note that when these files are excluded, they can still be specifically referenced by other files in your project (e.g. in an {include directives} or as a download), however, a change in those files will not trigger a build. An alternative in this case is to generate a table of contents (see Table of Contents). By default hidden folders (those starting with ., like .git), _build and node_modules are excluded.

Nested files will have flattened URLs¶

If a file is nested under a folder within your MyST project, for web-based exports its URL will be flattened to have a “slug” that removes folder information. For example:

• folder1/folder2/01_my_article.md becomes /my-article

All internal links will automatically be updated, and there is a file property that is exported as metadata in your site. See Exposing MyST and Document Metadata for more details on how cross-references are stored.