Manage navigation

Beyond pages, your sidebar navigation can include labels (section headings), links (to external URLs), and dividers (visual separators). The dxb nav commands let you add and inspect these without hand-editing docs.json, keeping the manifest valid.

Navigation node types

A space's nav array can contain these node types:

Pages and groups are created with dxb new page (groups form from nested folders). Labels, links, and dividers are added with dxb nav.

Common options

Most dxb nav subcommands accept:

Add a label

A label is a small heading that separates sections of the sidebar:

dxb nav add-label "Reference" --space docs

Add an external link

Link out to a URL — your status page, repo, or main site:

dxb nav add-link "Status" "https://status.example.com" --space docs

add-link takes the link text and the destination URL as its two arguments.

Add a divider

Insert a horizontal separator:

dxb nav add-divider --space docs

Remove a nav entry

Take a page or item out of the navigation (alias rm):

dxb nav remove guides/old-topic

Inspect the tree

View the full structure, including labels, links, and dividers:

dxb nav tree --space docs

Documentation (docs)
├─ Get started
│  ├─ Introduction
│  └─ Quickstart
├─ label: Reference
├─ Guides
└─ link: Status → https://status.example.com

Editing docs.json directly

You can edit docs.json by hand, but prefer the dxb nav commands — they validate the result and prevent common mistakes (referencing a missing file, duplicate slugs, malformed nodes). If you do edit by hand, run dxb lint afterward to catch problems:

{
  "type": "group",
  "label": "Get started",
  "items": [
    { "type": "page", "file": "get-started/introduction" },
    { "type": "page", "file": "get-started/quickstart" }
  ]
}

Next steps